See 454 Life Sciences.
The inaugural benchtop sequencer from 454 Life Sciences, which debuted in October 2005 (Margulies, M. et al,. Nature 2005). The first “next-generation” DNA sequencer, it used pyrosequencing and emulsion PCR, building hundreds of thousands of DNA sequence reads from the sequential cycling of four nucleotides and a luciferase-based assay. (The instrument name “GS20” stood for the 20 megabase output from a single run of the instrument.) The technology was successfully used for metagenomics and Neanderthal sequencing applications and amassed several high-profile publications. It also provided the basis for the first personal genome sequence of James D. Watson in 2007, published in Nature in 2008.