454 GS FLX
Illumina Genome Analyzer
ABI SOLiD Platform
Applications De novo sequencing, resequencing, transcriptome analysis, gene regulation studies, epigenetic changes, metagenomics & microbial diversity, paleogenomics analysis Resequencing, transcriptome analysis, gene regulation, ChIP, De novo with paired-end for smaller genomes, epigenetic changes Targeted resequencing, gene expression, microRNA discovery, ChIP, whole genome resequencing
Visualization Light from chemical reaction Color by fluorescence tags Four fluorescence tags
Read length 200 to 300 bases 25 to 40 bases 35 bases
Sequence generated per run More than 80 million bases More than a billion bases More than 3 billion bases
Run time 7.5 hours 3 days, 6 days for paired end Fragment library: 4 days
Mate pairs library: 8 days
Number of samples 2, 4 or 13 samples per run 8 samples per run 1 to 16 samples per run
Single-read accuracy 99.5% 99.9% 97%
Types of error Homopolymer errors, phase errors, chimaeras, duplicated fragments Read quality declines towards end of read Mis-incorporated bases
Multiplexing Up to 16 samples/plate; bar-coding tags in development 8 samples/slide; bar-coding tags in development 4 samples/slide; bar-coding tags in development
Paired-end reads Yes; read size 250bp; insert size variable Yes; read size 35bp; insert size 250bp, 500bp contiguous fragments, 1 - 15kb pairs library pairings Yes; read size 25bp; insert size 3kb - 8kb