This is super interesting and a promising development for those of us dreaming of running a lab out of a garage. I've never worked with Rothberg directly, but I

This is super interesting and a promising development for those of us dreaming of running a lab out of a garage. I've never worked with Rothberg directly, but I've read great stories of him cultivating entrepreneural talent in molecular biology. When PacBio was scaling their technology, they had lots of problems with photobleaching. It turns out shining intense laser light at a polymerase-nucleotide-fluorophore complex and inducing lots of electron flux in the fluorophore eventually causes an electron to get overexcited, jump around, and damage the machinery. PacBio eventually invested a lot in builidng elaborate shields into the nucleotide-fluorophore link, able to absorb the stray electrons and save the polymerase. Given that experience, I'd expect shining intense UV light into a TIRF volume to break the reversible terminator link will cause lots of photobleaching. It will be interesting to see if 454.bio can overcome this.