In this developing era, we come across new inventions every day. Almost a year back, Illumina and Bio-Rad Laboratories teamed up to invent a next-generation sequencing tool for single-cell study and had been introduced recently at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The tool is designed to aid the researchers in developing superior models of disease.

Let’s take a look how the Illumina Bio-Rad Single-Cell Sequencing Solution works and what it will provide the researches with.

The basic motive behind the teaming up was to make high-throughput sequencing of numerous single cells feasible, which by traditional means is high-cost, time-consuming, and challenging. The new Illumina Bio-Rad Single-Cell Sequencing Solution enables the researchers to study the way single cells contribute to disease progression, therapeutic response, and tissue function.

The companies will start the shipping of the system probably by next month. The system uses droplet partitioning technology of Bio-Rad to code and isolate single cells. Once isolated and coded, the single cells can be sequenced using Illumina’s next-generation sequencing tool. Additionally, the solution involves data analysis; primary and secondary data analyzed using Illumina’s cloud-based genomics computing environment, BaseSpace, whereas tertiary data visualization and analysis using FlowJo.

Illumina’s Vice President and General Manager of Applied Genomics, Rob Brainin, said, “We aim to equip scientist to promote complicated disease study by giving access to cell biologists to technologies which can make single-cell analysis simple to validate and cost-efficient.”

What do you think about this new technique for studying single cells? Feel free to share your thoughts.