DNA sequencing instrument.

Uppsala University intends to purchase a DNA sequencing instrument, a PacBio Sequel™ System from Pacific Biosciences. The instrument will be placed at the National Genomics Infrastructure — Uppsala Genome Center (NGI-UGC).

Uppsala University intends to purchase a DNA sequencing instrument, a PacBio Sequel™ System from Pacific Biosciences. The instrument will be placed at the National Genomics Infrastructure — Uppsala Genome Center (NGI-UGC).

Förklaring:

During the period 2013-2017, NGI-UGC has procured and established extensive peripheral equipment for sample preparation and sequencing with Pacific Biosciences technology. Total investment costs for peripherals and data servers amount to more than 3.5 MSEK. The purpose of the investments has been to make the operations more cost-effective and of higher quality. A supplement with another Sequel™ system can be integrated with existing testing and data management equipment. Today, 5 people work 100 % with sample preparation and handling of existing Sequel™ and RSII systems. The unique skills that exist within the group would become unusable with a change of sequence technology. Established methods for analysis and processing of sequence data would also be unusable with a change of technology, and would effectively mean that 4 researchers / bioinformatics would have to invest months to establish a new parallel analysis infrastructure. All in all, it would involve such extensive changes to a well-established infrastructure that we could not perform the assignments we have through the Science for Life Laboratory and the Swedish Research Council for several months.

NGI-UC has been offering service to the Swedish research community with the technology from Pacific Biosciences since 2013 on the RSII system. The Sequel™ system was introduced in 2015 and represents a further development of the technology. The Sequel™ system produces 7 times more data per unit of time and the cost of reading a nucleotide in the DNA chain is with the Sequel™ System is only one third of that of RSII. NGI-UGC purchased one Sequel system in February 2016. The demand for this type of sequencing analysis is constantly increasing, now resulting in unacceptably long waiting times, up to 6 months, for the researchers. With an additional Sequel™ system, more projects will be managed in parallel and delivery times halved.

The date given in V.2.1) is the date when this notice is sent to TED. A standstill period of ten days starts when the notice is published in TED. The contract will at the earliest be signed on the 7.12.2017.