CLC bio signs partnership agreement with Ion Torrent

CLC bio, the world's leading bioinformatics solution provider, today announced a partnership with Ion Torrent, a new sequencing company started by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, the founder of 454 Life Sciences. The partnership will ensure that data can directly flow off of the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM^™) sequencer and into CLC bio's solutions, like CLC Genomics Workbench or CLC Genomics Server.

“Our Ion PGM sequencer does a single run in about an hour, but for scientists to maintain a high-speed workflow with no bottlenecks it's critical for scientists to have user-friendly analysis capacity”

"Our Ion PGM sequencer does a single run in about an hour, but for scientists to maintain a high-speed workflow with no bottlenecks it's critical for scientists to have user-friendly analysis capacity," said CEO and Chairman of Ion Torrent, Jonathan M. Rothberg, Ph.D. "CLC bio is one of the leading developers of high-throughput sequence data analysis software, so we are pleased for the opportunity to partner with them."

Ion Torrent uses a massively parallel semiconductor sequencing technology that detects nucleotide additions without using light, optics, or lasers. Instead, a base is called by simply detecting the release of hydrogen ions following nucleotide incorporation. The Ion PGM sequencer can do a run in about an hour, offers semiconductor scalability and is one tenth the price of other sequencers to buy and to run.

Grant program

Ion Torrent™ will award two Ion PGM sequencers in April 2010 through a grant program designed to help make DNA sequencing accessible to all scientists. CLC bio is supporting this effort by supplying a lifetime license for CLC Genomics Workbench to each of the two winning grantees.