What is Illumina Genome Network?

[ymc]

Does that mean it is the end for most service providers except for the niche ones?

https://grcf.jhmi.edu/dna-services/sequencing/whole-genome-sequencing/

"Whole Genome Sequencing

The GRCF High Throughput Sequencing Center has teamed up with the Illumina Genome Network to offer complete human genome sequencing to the Johns Hopkins University.

We are happy to provide in-house whole genome sequencing, but our prices cannot match those of the Illumina Genome Network (it costs us more to buy the reagents than Illumina charges for a genome).

Illumina Genome Network

The Illumina Genome Network chooses its partners in order to ensure that sequencing projects are completed to the highest standard of quality with rapid turnaround. The Ilumina Genome Network partners perform whole human genome sequencing at 30x average coverage, from short-insert paired-end reads using a single library."

[GenoMax]

Illumina has been offering sequencing services for many years. I don't know if they have now started entertaining small scale (think few samples) sequencing requests. Perhaps that is what is different about the announcement you linked.

Sequencing has become a commodity over time and many local cores will likely go out of business as technology moves on to something new (and it becomes impossible to compete with "sequence" only external companies). Something similar to what happened with ABI/Sanger Sequencing.

[AllSeq]

The IGN was rolled out specifically for human whole genome sequencing and was (is?) probably being used to help keep the surprisingly large number of HiSeq X machines out there as busy as possible. While there's still info on illumina.com about the IGN, the link for actually ordering services now points to their own FastTrack Services (and doesn't seem to connect with any of the partners). I think what the IGN really means is that if you're interested in offering whole genome sequencing services you HAVE to have the HiSeq X platform to be remotely competitive (long-read applications notwithstanding).