Instead, Ion Torrent combines computer software with integrated circuits and complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) as used in digital cameras, laptop computers and mobile phones.
Optics-based technology, while extraordinarily accurate, also remains extraordinarily expensive. Optics-based sequencers use visible light, collecting photons from arrays and forming a visual image to detect how bases are incorporated into the genome. In a previous article by James Hadfield, we were briefly introduced to Ion Torrent along with the optical based systems of NGS. Ion Torrent takes a detour from the dominant optics-based technology found in Illumina’s sequencers. Since that dramatic announcement in the summer of 2011, Life Technologies and Ion Torrent have introduced a new exon-only sequencer which promises to deliver a human genome in one day- for $1,000. Just before Life Technologies purchased the start-up company Ion Torrent, the fledgling company was dealing with a torrent of another kind-worldwide media interest in its new sequencing technology, which promised to bring the price of next-generation, massively parallel sequencing down to $1,000 per run.