MGI Tech Co., Ltd. ("MGI"), a company committed to building core tools and technologies that drive innovation in life science, today announced the global rights to commercialize and distribute the new sequencing products CycloneSEQ-WT02* and CycloneSEQ-WY01*. With potential across different areas of genomics, CycloneSEQ™ technology integrates numerous technological improvements, including advanced protein engineering, a novel flow cell design, and a cutting-edge basecalling algorithm, to enable high accuracy and throughput in sequencing.

By integrating CycloneSEQ™ nanopore sequencing with our proprietary DNBSEQ™ sequencing technology, we are excited to further expand our omics technologies portfolio." said Duncan Yu, President of MGI. "This advancement allows us to provide MGI partners and customers worldwide with a full suite of omics capabilities across diverse range of sequencing throughputs and read lengths, single-cell sequencing, and spatial omics. With this, MGI solidifies its position as a life science technology provider to offer the most extensive multi-omics solutions available today."

Advanced features facilitate high-throughput, long-read sequencing

Leveraging its robust design improvements, CycloneSEQ™ has demonstrated competitive advantages in sequencing performance, bringing further flexibility and diversity to MGI's comprehensive range of life science research tools.

• Enhanced motor and nanopore protein performance. In an analysis of deep-sea metagenomic datasets collected from extreme environments, researchers discovered an abundance of proteins associated with genetic manipulation, showcasing significant structural diversity. Notably, a motor protein with high thermal stability, excels at unwinding nucleic acids, while a nanopore protein offers structural rigidity, low sequencing noise, and high signal quality due to its small pore diameter. Building on these novel structural features, CycloneSEQ™ leverages enhanced nucleic acid capture capabilities, enabling more efficient DNA threading. This improvement significantly boosts the platform's overall sequencing efficiency and reliability.
• Improved flow cell design. A single flow cell houses up to 4,096 nanopore protein sensors in a high-density array, optimized for ultra-low sequencing noise. Maximizing the expansion of microwell volume facilitates ultra-long sequencing times. The integration of BioMEMS and ASIC enables precise detection of picoampere-level currents, ensuring real-time, stable nucleic acid sequencing.
• Optimized basecalling algorithm. CycloneSEQ™ has independently developed a basecalling algorithm model. This algorithm model, based on extensive data and large-scale distributed training, achieves a high accuracy rate of 97% and is capable of real-time sequencing decoding for multiple flow cells, demonstrating robust performance.
• Innovative chemistry. CycloneSEQ™ has developed a novel sequencing chemistry, named nanopore local chemistry (NLC). By controlling the electrophoretic migration of Magnesium ions, Mg ions are pumped in to the Cis chamber and locally bounded to the ATP molecules. Subsequently, ATP-Mg is activated, thereby controlling the activity of the motor protein.

CycloneSEQ products empower diverse genomic applications

Based on this state-of-the-art technology, the new launched CycloneSEQ-WT02 and CycloneSEQ-WY01 sequencers have achieved significant breakthrough in throughput, accuracy, applications and flow cell design by building an optimal combination of patterns, demonstrating great potential in a variety of applications, including public health, genetic screening, reproductive health, environmental research, cancer research, genomics education, agri-genomics research and epigenomics research, etc.

CycloneSEQ-WT02 nanopore gene sequencer features a dual flow cell architecture, allowing for simultaneous independent operation. With the capacity to support fast coverage, swift sequencing, flexible testing and real-time analysis, CycloneSEQ-WT02 significantly shorten sequencing turnaround time, effectively overcoming the challenges of complex sequences. It has been successfully applied in a variety of scenarios, including the detection of complex genetic diseases such as thalassemia, generating telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome maps for small animals, deep-sea in situ exploration, rapid identification of clinical respiratory pathogens, and de novo genome assembly.

CycloneSEQ-WY01 is a high-throughput nanopore gene sequencer. It features a high-density flow cell and ultra-high throughput capabilities, enabling ultra-long read lengths, real-time sequencing, and continuous testing.

In terms of performance parameters, both sequencers offer read lengths ranging from bp to Mbp, accommodating a wide range of applications from basic research to complex disease studies. Sequencing can be completed within 10 minutes to 72 hours, depending on experimental needs, with an average speed of 350–420 nt/s. The single time accuracy is 97% and the consensus accuracy is 99.99% (40x). Results are delivered in real-time, ensuring a short detection cycle and reduced sequencing costs.

The CycloneSEQ-WT02 features up to 4,096 nanopore proteins per flow cell, with a maximum single-flow cell throughput of 50 Gb and up to 100 Gb for the dual flow cell system in real laboratory experiments. The CycloneSEQ-WY01, with over 30,000 nanopores proteins per flow cell, significantly enhances sequencing throughput and data output rate, helping users shorten sequencing cycles and improve efficiency.

CycloneSEQ-WT02 sequencer will be open for order in select countries later this year through MGI's commercial channel, and CycloneSEQ-WY01 is slated for available in H1, 2025.

With the latest sequencers added to robust lineup, MGI is now equipped to deliver a full-spectrum of sequencing technologies and a comprehensive product portfolio. This expansion fully embodies MGI's "SEQ ALL" approach, a term showcasing its capability in providing global users with a comprehensive toolkit for multi-omics research across various throughput, read length and applications.