Six years ago, China became the global leader in DNA sequencing — and it was all down to one company, BGI. The Shenzen-based firm had just purchased 128 of the world's fastest sequencing machines and was said to have more than half the world's capacity for decoding DNA. It was assembling an army of upstart young bioinformaticians, collaborating with leading researchers worldwide and publishing the sequences of creatures ranging from ancient humans to the giant panda. The firm was quickly gaining a reputation as a brute-force genome factory — more brawn than brains, said some. Six years later, the scene is quite different. BGI's most famous scientist and visionary leader, Jun Wang, left last July. The machine that had given the company its dominance is outdated, and the firm's attempt to develop its own industrial-scale whole-genome sequencer hit a roadblock last November, forcing it to lay off employees at its US subsidiary. Meanwhile, the competing system — Illumina's X series — has been selling briskly, raising the speed and dropping the price of sequencing worldwide. Armed with the latest sequencers, rival companies to BGI have emerged. Most prominent of these is Novogene in Beijing, founded in 2011 by former BGI vice-president Ruiqiang Li. And although BGI might not have the uncontested dominance it once did, it still claims to have the world's largest sequencing capacity as well as major scientific ambitions — including to sequence the genomes of one million people, one million plants and animals and one million microbial ecosystems. Today, China is being reborn as a sequencing power with a broader base. http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-bid-to-be-a-dna-superpower-1.20121
