The world's sequencing facilities, quantified

Each line is that platform’s share of the year’s named tracked-platform runs, normalized so every year sums to 100% — the compositional shift, not the volume. Illumina still owns the bulk, but Oxford Nanopore and PacBio carve out a widening slice and BGI/MGI a steady one: by 2025, Nanopore reached 2.5% of the tracked-platform cohort. Each year is the cohort that went public that year, so the curve reflects what was submitted as much as which instruments exist — read the long arc, not single-year wobbles. The separate platform-mix chart includes an explicit Other bucket for the whole archive.

Wellcome Sanger Institute leads with 3,841,042 runs — the alias-merged total of its 5 submitting-center spellings in ENA.

Among the 61 profiled centers, the top 10 account for 85% of runs (HHI 2670) and the single leader for 50% — concentration measured among profiled centers, not the whole archive.

Every center_name with ≥100 archive runs, ranked by run count. 61 profiled centers are alias-merged and annotated; the 80 discovered names are raw and not alias-merged, so the same institution can appear under more than one spelling. A further 760+ one-off submitters fall below the floor.

These are raw, alias-unmerged center_name strings from the discovery facet — often pandemic-surveillance consortia that bundle many institutions under one label. They’re used only to measure coverage and find centers worth profiling, never in the leaderboard numbers.

Country is the curated location of each center, summed by submission volume — United Kingdom leads with 17 centers and 4,980,675 runs. This view covers the 61 profiled centers across 20 countries; the 80 discovered names carry no facility country in the archive (only sample origin is recorded), so they can’t be placed by country — which is why the per-country counts sum to the profiled set, not all 141. The European skew is real: ENA is Europe’s archive, so US giants that deposit mainly in NCBI SRA appear smaller here than their true output.

Each bar is one center’s platform mix, normalized to its own runs — so a small center and a giant are comparable. Hover a segment for its share. Most centers are Illumina-dominant; the public-health labs in this set show the highest Oxford Nanopore share.

Of the 61 profiled centers, 41% are universities and just 4.9% are commercial firms — the rest are research institutes and public bodies. Firms are a smaller slice of the runs than of the centers: most keep their data private rather than deposit it in the open archive, which is exactly why a public-archive leaderboard under-counts them.

The single biggest center_name in the archive isn’t a sequencing center at all — it’s EMBL-EBI, the archive itself, with 17M submissions in ENA’s analysis index. These archive, mirror and aggregator names re-stamp data from the original submitters, so we exclude them from the leaderboard — otherwise they’d rank at the top without reflecting where the sequencing was done. Bars show analysis-index submissions (where brokering shows up most); the runs figure is their exact read_run count.

14 aggregator names carrying 885K read_run are excluded from the leaderboard.