Axbio
| Axbio | |
|---|---|
| Industry | DNA sequencing |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California |
| Key people | Hui Tian and Igor Ivanov (founders) |
| Products | AxiLona AXP-100, AxiLona EL-100 |
| Website | axbio.com |
Axbio is a company that builds nanopore DNA sequencers around a chip made with the same CMOS technology as computer processors. Its address is in Santa Clara, California, and its homepage tagline is "Discover the source code of life, safeguard the well-being of all."[1] Its sequencer, the AxiLona AXP-100, is a benchtop instrument for research use, and its chip carries an array of 1 million nanopores.[2]
History
Axbio was founded in 2016 by Hui Tian and Igor Ivanov. Tian had been a vice president at Genia Technologies, the California company that built a protein-pore sequencer on a semiconductor chip and was bought by Roche in 2014.[3][4] The company's first published patent application is titled "Methods, systems, and compositions for nucleic acid sequencing". It was filed on November 20, 2020, claims a priority date of May 22, 2018, and has four inventors, Tian and Ivanov among them.[5]
Method
Oxford Nanopore's sequencers thread the DNA strand itself through a protein pore. Axbio's application describes something else, nanopore sequencing by synthesis. A polymerase copies the template, and every nucleotide it adds carries a tag that is released on incorporation. A released tag that lodges in the pore changes its impedance, and that signal identifies the base. The polymerase can be tethered to the pore. It can also work on a circular double-stranded template, going round and round, and rolling circle amplification is named as one way to make the growing strand.[5]
The repetition is the point of the circle: many passes over one template can be merged into a consensus sequence. The accuracy given for the instrument below is stated for consensus calling.
The application says the pore can be a protein or a solid-state pore, and it lists silicon nitride, silicon oxide, graphene and molybdenum sulfide as materials.[5] The ASeq newsletter, in a 2021 analysis, found the discussion of solid-state pores long and the examples missing: the patents give no example procedures or data for them. Its author also noted that the original DNA is not what gets sequenced, so base modifications and native RNA are invisible to the method.[3]
Instruments
Genohub lists the AXP-100 as released in June 2023. A run takes about 4 hours and gives up to 100 gigabases from reads of 10 to 100 kilobases, with an accuracy above 99 percent after consensus calling. A higher-throughput model, the AXP-1000, is listed as in development.[2]
Axbio's site calls the chip "the world's highest density integrated circuit nanopore sequencing chip, with millions of sequencing channels on a single chip", says a 12-inch wafer of the chips is in mass production, and lists more than 50 patents worldwide.[1] A second product, the AxiLona EL-100, is a microarray analyzer.[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b c "Axbio". Axbio. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ a b "Axbio AxiLona AXP-100". Genohub. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ a b "AxBio: nanopore sequencing startup". ASeq Newsletter. November 19, 2021.
- ^ "Roche invests in Stratos Genomics for further development of the Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) method applied to single molecule nanopore sequencing". BioSpace. June 26, 2014.
- ^ a b c "US20210139971A1: Methods, systems, and compositions for nucleic acid sequencing". Google Patents. May 13, 2021.