ABI Solid Sequencing

SOLiD (Sequencing by Oligonucleotide Ligation and Detection) is a next-generation DNA sequencing technology developed by Life Technologies and has been commercially available since 2006. This next generation technology generates 10⁸ - 10⁹ small sequence reads at one time. It uses 2 base encoding to decode the raw data generated by the sequencing platform into sequence data.

This method should not be confused with "sequencing by synthesis," a principle used by Roche-454 pyrosequencing (introduced in 2005, generating millions of 200-400bp reads in 2009), and the Solexa system (now owned by Illumina) (introduced in 2006, generating hundreds of millions of 50-100bp reads in 2009)

These methods have reduced the cost from $0.01/base in 2004 to nearly $0.0001/base in 2006 and increased the sequencing capacity from 1,000,000 bases/machine/day in 2004 to more than 5,000,000,000 bases/machine/day in 2009. Over 30 publications exist describing its use first for nucleosome positioning from Valouev et al., transcriptional profiling or strand sensitive RNA-Seq with Cloonan et al., single cell transcriptional profiling with Tang et al. and ultimately human resequencing with McKernan et al.

The method used by this machine (sequencing-by-ligation) has been reported to have some issue sequencing palindromic sequences.