Hamilton Robotics has teamed up with Illumina to fully automate the upstream workflow of next-generation sequencing (NGS) sample preparation to lower operational variability and deliver improved as well as consistent results.
As part of the co-marketing partnership, Illumina will provide input on the protocols and assay performance and Hamilton will develop an NGS workstation and methods for Illumina's sample prep kits.
Both the companies will jointly market the solutions, but will sell them separately.
Automation of the upstream sample preparation of the NGS workflow will be carried out using Hamilton's higher-throughput Microlab STAR pipetting workstation or NIMBUS NGS Workstation with Illumina's TruSeq and Nextera kits.
Illumina Product Marketing and Market Development senior director Peter Fromen said that fully automating sample preparation kits will greatly reduce manual pipetting time and improve library consistency.
Initial development of the Hamilton's NGS workstations is planned to start with deck placement options and software with a graphical user interface (GUI) for easy automation setup and simple user control.
Launch of methods for TruSeq Total Stranded RNA kits will take place in the summer of 2013, whereas other methods will be developed and made available in the latter part of this year.
