I’m really pleased to have a commentary article published in Nature Methods today: A profusion of confusion in NGS methods naming. My colleague Jaques Retief and I have been talking about NGS methods for many years and decided to write this article to highlight some of the difficulties that unrestricted naming can have on users trying to negotiate the sequencing landscape.

In the article we present a few of the more confusing naming examples. We make suggestions for naming future methods, and also describe a definitive list of methods, ordered by function. We also present the Wiki I’ve been meaning to open up for over a year – Enseqlopedia, and it is finally live to coincide with the Nature Methods article. Hopefully organising methods and structuring naming to allow new users to navigate the NGS publication landscape is going to help users find information more quickly and more easily. We encourage NGS users to add to this conversation!

The Wiki is very much version 1.0 and I’ve some plans for making it much more like the Wiki’s many of us use. Unfortunately the pressures of the day-job, travelling to japan to spend the Summer working on Nanopore sequencing, and getting a new job with Astra Zeneca have meant I’ve simply not had the time to get 2.0 ready for release. Please bear with me, and feel free to send comments.

Probably all of you know Jaques from his work developing the “For all you seq” posters. Illumina have extended the original work by Jaques to develop their methods explorer – an interactive web tool listing 100s of NGS library prep methods. Thanks Jaques for the inspiration and the wonderful posters.

Updates:

Slides from my ABRF talk on this: https://www.slideshare.net/jameshadfield/abrf-2017-hadfield-j

PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29298293

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4558