← All metrics

Sequencing technology

Which sequencing platform dominates?

EMBL-EBI ENA · cumulative public runs by instrument platform

90%of all public ENA runs are on Illumina
101001.0K10K100K1.0M10M100M2014201620182020202220242026
Illumina39M · 90%Oxford Nanopore1.1M · 3%PacBio945K · 2%MGI / BGI660K · 2%Ion Torrent542K · 1%454419K · 1.0%Sanger366K · 0.9%Other173K · 0.4%

Each line is the cumulative count of public sequencing runs deposited to the European Nucleotide Archive on that platform, on a log scale. Illumina’s sequencing-by-synthesis short reads dominate the archive by a wide margin; Oxford Nanopore and PacBio are the long-read challengers, while 454 and Sanger (dashed) are effectively retired and barely grow. Counts are a deposition proxy — one record per submitted run, biased toward data-sharing communities — not instrument sales or bases sequenced, and the most recent period undercounts until embargoes lift. Other is the archive total minus the named platform series. Each platform is counted live from the ENA Portal API.

SourceEMBL-EBI / European Nucleotide Archive
Update cadenceweekly
Live endpointENA Portal API · count(read_run) by instrument_platform
Per-platform cards/api/research-data?category=sequencing-technology

Each platform also has its own metric — open Illumina, Oxford Nanopore, PacBio, MGI/BGI, Ion Torrent, 454 or Sanger for its full history. · back to all metrics

Report errorpmu15@helmholtz-hzi.de