BGI strikes back at Illumina in tit-for-tat patent infringement battle

A subsidiary of the Chinese sequencing giant BGI is filing a patent infringement suit agains the US sequencing giant. The BGI subsidiary, Complete Genomics, filed its complaint in the the District Court of Deleware, claiming infringement on a patent for “methods and compositions for efficient base calling in sequencing reactions,” which is all pretty central to high throughput sequencing. This appears to be a response to Illumina filing a complaint earlier this month against BGI Europe and Latvia MGI Tech, another BGI subsidiaries, earlier this year. These are probably just the early stages of what is likely to be a long series of antagonistic maneuvers between giants. It is unlikely that this Coke-versus-Pepsi style competition will do much to reduce the dominance of these groups, but one can hope that as this battle plays out some of the smaller sequencing players will grow and insert a little more competition into the market.

All the links in this post are from Genome-Web, another excellent genome news source.