According to Life, the SOLiD 4hq will be able to produce a 30X (100Gb) human genome for $3,000 in reagents (they also claim SOLiD 4 can do it for $6000); this doesn’t include library prep, but that is probably not very costly. If they can back this up with data (as the HiSeq has so far), then they will be able to push their price down below Illumina ($10k per genome, dropping to around $4k by the end of the year, though these include library prep)

Whether a) they can actually bring the price down as they say they can and b) this will be enough to persaude all the genome centers to completely change their pipelines to handle SOLiD machines and data, is still to be seen. I still can’t really see it happening, but I am starting to realise that I was too dismissive of SOLiD in this post.

You’re right, I shouldn’t dismiss the throughput of SOLiD, they do have some big improvements in the pipeline. However, I still don’t see SOLiD making inroads into Illumina’s dominance in sequencing centers.

Illumina claims yields of 200Gb in 8 days (25Gb/day) for the HiSeq, and SOLiD 4 claims 100Gb per run: they don’t say how long this takes, but SOLiD 3+ takes 12-14 days, so we’ll call it 8Gb per day.

Potential for growth: Illumina can raise its cluster density to that of the GAIIx with ease, bringing the throughput per day up to 43Gb/day. SOLiD will bring out the SOLiD 4 hq, which will produce 300Gb per run; assuming this doens’t raise the runtime (a very big if), this will bring their throughput up to a maximum of 25Gb per day.

You also need to think about Illumina’s massively longer read lengths (a maximum of twice the size now).

Not saying that SOLiD doens’t have other advantages. I just can’t really see SOLiD breaking Illumina’s market dominance, when Illumina has so consistently widened the gap in throughput over the past year, and shows no signs of stopping.