Metagenomics takes another approach, basically putting an entire environment--the water in an ocean, the soil in a forest or the insides of an animal--into a DNAsequencer.
It was hurt both by general worries over whether academic laboratories will tighten their belts and questions over how quick the uptake of its new DNAsequencer is.
The promise of the PGM was to allow researchers to get answers faster, and for labs to be able to get access to a DNAsequencer for a price that could be paid for from the budget of a single academic library.
Ion Torrent entered this market in 2010, the brainchild of biotech entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg. (I wrote a Forbes cover story about him in 2011.) Rothberg figured out how to make a DNAsequencer using semiconductor parts that would be significantly cheaper than the machines Illumina sold.