Ion Torrent Proton

The Ion Proton™ system is designed for high-throughput sequencing using semiconductor technology that directly translates chemical information into digital data, eliminating the need for optics and complex sequencing chemistries. EMSL currently has two Ion Proton™ systems together with the two Ion Chef™ systems for sample preparation. In EMSL, we use the Proton system mainly for RNA-Seq, with a focus on meta-transcriptomic analysis of complex microbial communities, and whole transcriptome analyses of plants, fungi and other organisms relevant to bioenergy, climate change or carbon cycling in the environment, among other DOE-BER focus areas. The Proton can sequence longer reads, which helps supporting de novo assembly of transcriptome data in the absence of the reference genome. In EMSL we use the Proton systems interchangeably with the SOLiD systems according to need and availability.