Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Next generation DNA sequencing provides new opportunities to efficiently accomplish a variety of genomic tasks such as the de novo assembly of genomes. The newly released 454 FLX Titanium in October 2008 advanced the previous 454 FLX Standard system with nearly double the sequence reads and read lengths. A thorough assessment and optimization of 454 FLX Titanium sequencing system was done by the Technology Development Group at Joint Genome Institute. Currently applications like de novo whole genome shotgun assembly, transcriptome profiling, pyrotag sequencing and sequence capture technology are being optimized on the new 454 FLX Titanium systems.