Takara Bio USA, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan headquartered Takara Bio Inc., has announced the launch of the Shasta Single-Cell System, an automated, high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) solution with well-validated chemistries and intuitive bioinformatics tools that enables novel biomarker discovery for oncology research.

This complete system allows researchers to mine more genomic and transcriptomic information from many more cells than possible with current technologies, while saving time and costs for research groups.

Existing whole-genome amplification (WGA) technologies currently process 96–384 single cells per plate; the Shasta system increases WGA throughput to 1,500 cells per run. With its total RNA-seq application, the Shasta system detects more RNA biotypes with high sensitivity at high throughput, up to 100,000 cells per run which is an improvement over both plate-based full-length RNA-seq and high-throughput mRNA-seq methods.

In March, Takara Bio USA delivered instruments and NGS kits to early-access users, who have started producing results with the system. The company is accepting orders with plans to ship instruments and chemistries towards the end of Q2.