10x Genomics has entered into collaborations with Illumina ($ILMN), Agilent Technologies ($A) and Qiagen ($QGEN). The long-read specialist, which emerged from stealth mode last year with a $55.5 million fund raising round, has struck the deals to boost the reach and capabilities of products based on its GemCode technology.

Pleasanton, CA-based 10x Genomics used the week of Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) to unveil the raft of collaborations. Given that 10x Genomics has created technology that is designed to enhance products sold by Illumina, the alliance with the sequencing giant is perhaps the least surprising of the three deals. The collaboration will see Illumina co-market 10x Genomics' Linked-Read sequencing products, an alliance that it has entered into after assessing the ability of the technology to improve its goods.

Illumina EVP Christian Henry likes what he has seen. "The GemCode technology provides HiSeq X Ten, HiSeq, NextSeq and Miseq sequencing users a plug-and-play upgrade to their existing systems, giving them access to a broad range of critical information, and at a much lower cost and a higher quality than other long-read sequencing systems on the market," Henry said in a statement.

The potential of the technology has also enabled 10x Genomics to land a co-marketing deal with Qiagen. As well as co-promoting products, the collaborators will assess the capacity for Qiagen's bioinformatics tools to process 10x Genomics' Linked-Read data. Aspects of the alliance revolve around Chromium, which integrates single cell sequencing into 10x Genomics' existing GemCode technology. The system, which was unveiled this week, is also the basis of 10x Genomics' development collaboration with Agilent.

"Optimized Agilent SureSelect panels running with the 10x Genomics Chromium platform will add significant value to our customers' targeted sequencing projects by offering loci in the genome that were previously difficult to access, as well as compound heterozygote phasing, structural variation and copy number detection," 10x Genomics CEO Serge Saxonov said in a statement.