“It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts!” Turns out that the first statement very much does matter when it comes to cell free DNA. It is becoming clearer that the size of cfDNA and ctDNA is information that […]
On Friday last week I had the pleasure of hosting a half-day Nanostring symposium at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute (my previous employer). The symposium was arranged as an opportunity to get Nanostring users, and potential users, together to hear about the exciting developments in […]
The FDA issued a safety communication today on the risk that biotin supplements “can significantly interfere with certain lab tests and cause incorrect test results”. The FDA communiqué mentions an increase in reported adverse events, and even one death, because of Biotin interference. Biotin interferes with some […]
Last week the first issue of a new journal debuted: The CRISPR Journal. With a massive number of journals out there why should any of us care about a new one? I would not normally read the first issue of a Journal (although I did […]
Two papers in Science last week show how CRISPR can be used as a diagnostic tool. The first comes from the same team at The Broad that brought us the SHERLOCK method, the second from Jennifer Dounda’s group at Berkley. Both methods promise simple diagnostics […]
The 10XGenomics workshop just closed at AGBT and they announced some truly revolutionary new applications: single-cell feature barcoding, single-cell ATAC-Seq and single-cell CNV (feat CBGB). I’ll go through each of these in more detail below but I wanted to start by highlighting the success of single-cell analysis […]
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 […]
I’ve been meaning to write up a post on a BioRxiv report from earlier this year: “Scaling single cell transcriptomics through split pool barcoding”1. The Seelig Lab at the University of Washington have developed a single-cell RNA sequencing method to enable labelling RNA molecules with cell-of-origin information using […]
A recent BioRxiv report from the Gerlinger group at ICR describes a targeted ctDNA sequencing method that uses error correcting UMIs to achieve 100% sensitivity for mutant allele frequencies of >0.15%, and 87% at >0.075%, and reduce false-positive mutation calls by 98.6%, without adversely affecting the […]
In this post I wanted to highlight the wonderful “Excel vs R: A Brief Introduction to R” by Jesse Sadler. This is full of useful and practical advice on using R in place of Excel (or any other spreadsheet) for simple data analysis. I use […]
