Ion Torrent Laboratory Equipment and Products

About Ion Torrent

Ion Torrent has pioneered an entirely new approach to sequencing that enables a direct connection between chemical and digital information. Ion Torrent™ technology doesn't use light—it's the first commercial PostLight™ sequencing technology.

Instead, Ion Torrent marries simple chemistry to incredibly powerful, proprietary semiconductor technology—it's Watson meets Moore. The result is a sequencing system that issimpler, faster, more cost effective and scalablethan any other technology available. The company's goal is to democratize sequencing and make this critical technology available to every lab.

Up to now scientists have had to go through an intermediary, such as light, to translate chemical data into digital data. That approach requires proprietary chemistry and optics, like cameras, lasers and scanners. As a result sequencing is complex, slow, and hugely expensive, making it accessible only to the biggest research labs.

By contrast, Ion Torrent sequencing technology requires no proprietary chemistries or optics because it's based on a well-characterized biochemical process. When a nucleotide is incorporated into a strand of DNA by a polymerase, a hydrogen ion is released as a byproduct. That hydrogen ion carries a charge which our proprietary ion sensor can detect. If a nucleotide, for example a C, is added to a DNA template and a signal is detected, you know that nucleotide was incorporated. Our sequencer—essentially the world's smallest solid-state pH meter—has called the base, going directly from chemical information to digital information. Because this is direct detection, each nucleotide incorporation is recorded in seconds and you can do an entire run in about an hour.

What sets Ion Torrent apart from other sequencing methods is that we don't just borrow ideas from the semiconductor industry, we actually use the entire semiconductor supply chain. Because Ion Torrent produces its proprietary semiconductor chips in standard CMOS factories, we leverage the $1 trillion dollar investment that has been made in the semiconductor industry over the past 40 years. This industry's huge manufacturing infrastructure enables Ion Torrent to meet any demand for our chips.

Ion Torrent also directly benefits from four decades of exponential improvement in semiconductor technology, also known as Moore's Law.This provides massive scalability. Wafer-based semiconductor production enables our chips to scale in density for any application, from small, targeted experiments, to large genomes, all on a single platform.

The semiconductor has transformed every industry it's touched. Just as the microprocessor enabled desktop computing to displace the mainframe, Ion Torrent semiconductor technology will inevitably democratize sequencing, putting it within the reach of any lab or clinic.

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