Illumina, Inc. is an American company. Incorporated on April 1, 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. The company provides a line of products and services that serves the sequencing, genotyping and gene expression, and proteomics markets. Its headquarters are located in San Diego, California.

Illumina sells a number of high-throughput DNA sequencing systems, also known as DNA sequencers, based on technology developed by Solexa. The technology features bridge amplification to generate clusters and reversible terminators for sequence determination. The technology behind these sequencing systems involves ligation of fragmented DNA to a chip, followed by primer addition and sequential fluorescent dNTP incorporation and detection.

Three of the most popular Illumina sequencers are the MiSeq, HiSeq, and NovaSeq. From a single run, the MiSeq generates 30 million reads, the HiSeq generates 3 billion reads, and the NovaSeq generates 13 billion reads. Comparatively, the NovaSeq has the ability to generate 4 trillion bases in a day whereas Sanger sequencing can only generate one million bases per day. New machines have the capacity to sequence the entire human genome in 48 hours at the price of $1,000. Illumina sequencers are highly accurate, and only have an error once every thousand bases.

Since its founding in 1998, Illumina has become an industry leader, with more than 90% of the global sequencing market and an installed base of more than 17,000 sequencing systems.

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