The University Hospital Aachen intends to purchase a short-read benchtop sequencer including a maintenance contract and consumables for the device.

PAR-0001
Market Survey - Short-Read Benchtop Sequencer.
The University Hospital Aachen intends to purchase a short-read benchtop sequencer including a maintenance contract for at least 4 years and consumables for the device. The short-read benchtop sequencer to be procured must meet the following specialized and technical requirements: . - The sequencer should be suitable for small to medium-sized projects and provide a variable throughput in the range of approximately 100 million to 1 billion reads. Read lengths between 2 × 75 bp and 2 × 300 bp should be supported. - The library preparation protocols established in the facility from common providers (e.g., NEB, Lexogen, Qiagen, etc.) must be compatible with the system or able to be adapted to the sequencer with reasonable effort. - The system should deliver high data quality and particularly low error rates in homopolymer regions. A significant proportion of the generated reads should achieve quality values in the range of Q40 to Q50. - The sequencer should have two independent flow cells that can be operated in parallel and flexibly over time, allowing multiple sequencing runs to be started simultaneously or staggered. In addition, it should be possible to load individual lanes of the flow cells separately and with different libraries to further increase operational flexibility. - To reduce the manual workload in the lab, the system should support an integrated and automated target enrichment workflow (e.g., for exome sequencing). - The operating costs of the system should overall be competitive. For reliable long-term budget planning, a guarantee for constant reagent prices throughout the device's lifespan is assumed. - For reasons of sustainability and to further reduce future investment costs, the system should be expandable to a multi-omics platform through a modular hardware upgrade. This upgrade should allow for the simultaneous analysis of individual cells regarding morphology, spatial RNA expression, as well as protein expression and phosphorylation. . From the perspective of the University Hospital, the need can currently only be met by one market participant. This market survey is being conducted to verify this assumption.