OREANDA-NEWS. October 20, 2015. Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced the 4200 TapeStation system, a fully automated instrument that enables scientists to rapidly analyze up to 96 DNA samples at a time.

"We designed the new instrument —the successor to our popular 2200 TapeStation system—to address the need for both higher throughput and higher quality in next-generation sequencing labs," said Knut Wintergerst, Marketing and Support manager for Agilent's microfluidics product line.

He noted that sample quality has a direct impact on the fidelity of sequencing data.

"High-fidelity data is essential," continued Wintergerst, "to enable researchers to use their data to identify DNA-based diseases, for example."

The 4200 TapeStation system enables end-to-end quality control of samples and libraries in any sequencing workflow, using any number of samples from one to 96, at a constant cost per sample.

Agilent TapeStation systems are easy to use because they employ a range of prepackaged kits for RNA, DNA and genomic DNA samples. Agilent's portfolio now includes two new kits—the D5000 and HS D5000 ScreenTape assays —which have been specially designed for analyzing DNA fragments and smears of up to 5,000 base pairs.