Advances in sequencing technology now make it possible to obtain the sequence of entire genomes. SpectruMedix Corp. of State College, Pa., continues this trend with the introduction of the SCE9610, an automated 96-capillary instrument for high-throughput DNA sequencing, fragment analysis, and genotyping. The science behind the SCE9610 is based on award-winning technology developed by Edward Yeung at the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University.1 The SCE9610 uses a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera to record laser-excited fluorescence simultaneously from each capillary. According to Thomas Kane, senior scientist at SpectruMedix, the SCE9610 is currently the "largest-capacity system commercially available today." It can run six trays of 96 samples unattended for up to 12 hours.
Kane notes that the SCE9610 represents an improvement over other capillary-based sequencing systems in three respects: It is robust and reliable, offers no possibility of sample cross-contamination, and provides a high degree of flexibility with respect to software, ...
