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Institutional Case Study: Max Planck Society​

The previous sections provide top-down market perspectives. Here, I shift to an institution-level view to show how platform adoption, sequencing volume, and library strategy choices vary across research institutes in a single organisation.

As a case study, I use the Max Planck Society (84 institutes). A subset of institutes appears in my metadata database, enabling structured comparisons of platform usage, read-length profiles, and library strategy composition.

Institutes present in this dataset
  • Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  • Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology
  • Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics
  • Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research
  • Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology
  • Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
  • Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics
  • Max Planck Institute for Biology Tuebingen
  • Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
  • Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
  • Max Planck Institute for Ornithology
  • Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine
  • Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
  • Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens
  • Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
  • Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
  • Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research
  • Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
  • Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
  • Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology
  • Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics

Guiding questions: Which institutes account for the majority of sequencing output? How do their platform mixes differ (short-read vs long-read)? And how do library strategies vary across institutes, reflecting distinct scientific priorities and pipeline constraints?

Institute read-length profile vs total output by sequencing platform

Each bubble represents a platform–institute combination. The x-axis reflects average read length, the y-axis reflects total bases, and bubble size indicates experiment count. A small number of institutes (e.g. MPI Tübingen) dominate total output, consistent with institutional concentration of sequencing infrastructure and throughput-intensive programmes.


Library strategies by institute

Composition of library strategies per institute (e.g. whole genome & related, transcriptomics, amplicon/PCR, epigenetics & accessibility), highlighting how scientific focus and established pipelines shape sequencing demand.

Library strategy composition by Max Planck institute

Platform usage per institute

Platform mix per institute at instrument-family level (e.g. NovaSeq, HiSeq, Sequel), showing heterogeneity in adoption and the persistence of legacy systems alongside newer high-throughput platforms.

Sequencing platform usage per institute

Main institutes per platform

The inverse view: for each platform/instrument family, which institutes contribute most of the observed usage. This is useful for identifying “anchor centres” that drive volume and therefore influence procurement inertia and platform transition dynamics.

Main institutes per sequencing platform

From a market intelligence perspective, this example illustrates that sequencing “markets” are rarely uniform: volume is often concentrated in a small number of high-throughput institutes, while adoption of newer platforms typically begins through localized pilot deployments before scaling organisation-wide.