Takara Bio and SPT Labtech pair SMART-Seq kits with firefly automation scripts

Takara Bio's first product to launch with a workflow tuned for firefly automation will be the SMART-Seq mRNA Long Read Extended kit, which is due to ship in January 2027. On October 20, Takara Bio USA and SPT Labtech said they will work together to develop and verify automated library preparation workflows that run Takara Bio's next-generation sequencing (NGS) chemistries on the firefly liquid handling platform from SPT Labtech. SMART-Seq RNA-seq kits come first. The companies then plan to cover new RNA-seq, DNA-seq and immune profiling kits.

The announcement came jointly from San Jose and Cambridge, UK, on the opening day of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting, held October 20, 24 in Montreal, where both companies planned to exhibit and present posters. Takara Bio USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Takara Bio Inc., so the launch-package commitment covers the chemistry side of the house, with SPT Labtech supplying the hardware and script distribution.

The companies' joint release says Takara Bio is building automation into its NGS technology launch package, so labs can go from evaluating a product to running it routinely at scale in less time. Andrew Farmer, president and CEO of Takara Bio USA, described this as a shift in how the company sells. He said the work with SPT Labtech is turning automation into a core part of the way Takara Bio takes NGS products to market. He added that customers should expect new library prep products to come with automated workflows from day one.

That matters most to the people the release names as the target: NGS core labs and other high-volume library prep operations that want to expand their capabilities but are short on staff, bench space or budget. The Scientist, in its coverage of the launch, called library preparation the throughput bottleneck for sequencing cores even as instrument costs fall. It also cited a 2022 BMC Genomics benchmark that found meaningful differences in gene detection sensitivity across full-length single-cell RNA-seq workflows.

The Scientist read that evidence as reinforcing the value of validated, ready-to-run automation. The logic is straightforward: if the choice of workflow measurably moves what a lab detects, then the method itself becomes something worth fixing in place, and a pre-verified script is one way to fix it.

Two SMART-Seq workflows running today

Labs do not need to hold off until January. SPT Labtech's cloud portal already offers downloadable scripts for two kits on the market today, each including unique molecular identifiers (UMIs): SMART-Seq Total RNA Library Prep with ZapR Depletion and SMART-Seq mRNA LP. A technical note covering SMART-Seq mRNA LP on firefly is also available.

One handles very low-input and single-cell work. The other takes 250 pg to 1 µg of total RNA, including degraded and FFPE samples. Both kits produce multiplexed libraries ready for Illumina sequencers.

Between them, the two scripts span very different sample types, from a single cell at one end to degraded FFPE material at the other. For a core that takes work from many research groups, that range suggests the first release was chosen to cover common short-read requests rather than a niche application.

A benchtop robot with an audit trail

The Scientist reports that firefly, sold as firefly 3 and firefly 6, puts four capabilities (pipetting, dispensing, incubation and shaking) in one compact benchtop unit. An add-on called firefly+ adds a thermocycler for hands-free library prep from start to finish. Paul Lomax, head of genomics at SPT Labtech, said in the release that the aim is to give labs automated library prep without the infrastructure that larger automation platforms often need.

"We believe automation should be a practical option for every genomics lab," Lomax said, pointing to firefly's all-in-one design and small footprint. The companies say the platform is meant both for labs that already automate and for those setting up automated workflows for the first time, and that the jointly built workflows are simple to integrate into existing processes.

According to the companies, firefly's intuitive programming environment, configurable user permissions and transparent audit trail support standardization across teams. They also say firefly's peer-to-peer cloud network lets laboratories access verified methods directly, which helps reduce time to first run and improve consistency across sites.

Those controls would matter most in a core where several staff run the same method on behalf of many users. Permissions limit who can change a verified script, and the audit trail records what actually ran, which is the kind of reproducibility Lomax described as needed for routine sequencing operations.

A Cambridge core helped build the ZapR method

The NGS Hub at the University of Cambridge's Stratified Medicine Core Laboratory worked with both companies to automate the Total RNA ZapR workflow on firefly. Ana Luisa Toribio, head of the hub, said in the release that her researchers brought real-world operating experience to the method, aiming for deep sequencing results that hold up run after run. She said that for a flagship facility running multi-omics research from start to finish, nothing matters more than data depth and reproducibility that admit no compromise.

The release frames this kind of partnership around what high-volume sequencing cores keep chasing: throughput, reproducibility and operational efficiency. The ZapR kit is the one built for degraded and FFPE inputs, so having a working core help shape its automated version suggests the script was tested against a demanding sample type, not only clean reference material.

Long reads come with a lower library ceiling

The January kit is a different kind of product. SMART-Seq mRNA Long Read Extended is built for Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencers, not Illumina. According to Takara Bio, the kit accepts a wider range of inputs and recovers more full-length transcripts, which supports isoform discovery, detection of gene fusions and analysis of alternative splicing. The Scientist's comparison table lists a maximum of 96 libraries for it, a quarter of the 384 shown for each short-read workflow.

Like the two short-read kits, it carries UMIs, which the release ties to greater quantitation confidence. The companies pitch the kit-plus-script pairing as a way to standardize long-read transcriptomics at scale with increased operational efficiency.

Long-read protocols are more complex, which The Scientist noted with reference to a 2025 Genome Research perspective on the method challenges long-read RNA-seq still faces, arguing that the added complexity raises the stakes for manual variability. Automation helps most where manual variation is a risk. That puts the long-read kit where a verified script should pay off most, and also where the 96-library ceiling bites: matching one maximum short-read batch would take four long-read batches.

January shows whether the model holds

For a core running firefly, the method-building work now happens at Takara Bio and SPT Labtech, which jointly build and verify the automation scripts. That suggests the core's own job shifts from writing a method to downloading one and checking it against local samples.

The bigger test comes later. If the promised DNA-seq and immune profiling kits arrive with firefly scripts on their launch dates, script-at-launch becomes how Takara Bio sells NGS chemistry. If they arrive months behind the reagents, it stays an RNA-seq convenience.