New paired-end sequencing capabilities and higher-throughput consumables double read output, allowing a single system to process up to 60,000 genomes annually.
Ultima Genomics has commercially launched paired-end sequencing on its UG200 Series platforms alongside its new Solaris 2.0 Max sequencing consumables, delivering up to 20 billion reads per wafer to achieve a $60 human genome.
The company is showcasing the new capabilities at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2026 Annual Meeting in Montreal. The Solaris 2.0 Max consumables double the read output of previous Solaris workflows and, when paired with the UG200 Ultra, enable clinical and research laboratories to sequence up to 60,000 30x whole human genomes per year on a single instrument.
The Solaris 2.0 Max workflow is compatible with both the UG200 Series and UG100 platforms. Ultima will continue supporting its existing 10 billion-read Solaris 2.0 workflow and plans to roll out 5 billion and 10 billion read-per-wafer configurations in early 2027 to provide laboratories with scalable options based on project volume and budget.
“Paired-end sequencing and Solaris 2.0 Max are the two capabilities our customers have asked for most as they work to deploy Ultima’s sequencing technology across more applications, especially germline applications requiring clinical quality,” says Gilad Almogy, founder and CEO of Ultima Genomics, in a release. “Doubling output while bringing the genome to $60 changes what is economically possible for large programs, health systems, and biobanks—and with paired-end reads and pangenome-aware analysis, they can get ultra-high throughput, low cost, and quality in the same sequencing runs.”
Enhanced Coverage for Complex Genomic Regions
Paired-end sequencing reads both ends of each DNA fragment, improving read alignment in repetitive and structurally complex genomic regions while providing native compatibility with standard bioinformatics pipelines. Combined with the amplification technology in Solaris 2.0, the platform improves coverage uniformity across tandem repeats and high-GC regions.
These technical capabilities are targeted at strengthening performance for germline whole-genome sequencing, structural variant identification, and other high-volume sequencing applications where data fidelity is critical.
Early access users in clinical diagnostics and functional genomics have already begun evaluating the technology.
“We are a large clinical laboratory focused on delivering the highest quality testing on the most advanced technologies to patients,” says David Schlesinger, CEO and co-founder of Mendelics, in a release. “We have been evaluating Ultima’s paired-end sequencing capability for clinical germline applications. The technology represents a significant advance in quality over previous generations of Ultima chemistry, and we have identified many areas of the genome where this capability offers marked improvements over other approaches.”
Adoption Across Large-Scale Initiatives
Beyond clinical germline testing, the technology has also been deployed in high-throughput cellular screening platforms.
“We ran one of our largest Perturb-seq experiments to date using this chemistry, generating hundreds of billions of reads in just days on a small number of instruments,” says Ajamete Kaykas, chief exploration officer at Insitro, in a release. “Generating data at this scale quickly and affordably lets us routinely run large screens and refine each experiment, exactly what it takes to build foundational datasets.”
The commercial launch follows the platform’s selection to support the Precure initiative led by the Mayo Clinic and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Ultima is also collaborating with NVIDIA on a pangenome-aware secondary analysis workflow using Google DeepVariant, with early performance data slated for presentation during the ASHG meeting.
