Illumina, Inc. and Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. announced the launch of the Illumina® Bio-Rad® Single-Cell Sequencing Solution at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The comprehensive solution is the first next-generation sequencing workflow for single-cell analysis, providing researchers the ability to investigate the coordinated contribution of individual cells in tissue function, disease progression, and therapeutic response. Single-cell analysis enables a deep view into the gene expression of individual cells to understand their functions in complex tissues.

The solution delivers high-throughput sequencing of thousands of individual cells, traditionally a challenging, costly, and time consuming process. Human development and disease research, fields in which single-cell sequencing is widely applicable, is expected to benefit most from this new offering. The solution comprises the ddSEQ™ Single-Cell Isolator and SureCell™ WTA 3' Library Prep Kit.

Bio-Rad's droplet partitioning technology, Droplet Digital™ technology, is used to isolate and barcode single cells for downstream sequencing on many of Illumina's leading NGS instruments. The comprehensive workflow solution includes primary and secondary data analysis conducted via the BaseSpace® Informatics Suite, Illumina's cloud-based genomics computing environment, and tertiary data analysis and visualization with SeqGeq™ from FlowJo, LLC.