Fast, cost-effective, and flexible DNA sequencing by roll-to-roll fluidics

Abstract

Despite decreasing prices per DNA base pair over the past decade, small-scale next-generation sequencing (NGS) remains prohibitive in urgent clinical settings, since the reagent efficiency of sequence-by-synthesis (SBS) is low in the corresponding flow cells. Here we show NGS by roll-to-roll fluidics (r2r-fl), which is cost-effective for flexible biochip sizes. R2r-fl is a practical implementation of plane-Couette flow, with up to 85 times lower reagent consumption (US$ 0.16 per giga base pair), rinsing times of less than 2 seconds, and shortened turnaround times (TAT) for paired-end 100 bp (PE100) sequencing from days to under 12 hours.