8 06, 2018

Single-cell indexing for methylation analysis (sci-MET)

By | June 8th, 2018|Categories: Library Prep, Methods and applications, Single-cell sequencing|0 Comments

Andrew Adey’s group at OHSU published sci-MET – a single cell method for whole-genome methylation analysis in Nature Biotech last month: Highly scalable generation of DNA methylation profiles in single cells. In this they described their indexing method and report on an analysis of over 3000 […]

17 05, 2018

Size matters…for cfDNA (and ctDNA)

By | May 17th, 2018|Categories: ctDNA, Library Prep, Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing|0 Comments

“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 […]

15 05, 2018

Nanostring in Cambridge

By | May 15th, 2018|Categories: Diagnostics Tech, Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing|0 Comments

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 […]

1 05, 2018

Biotin health supplements may affect lab tests

By | May 1st, 2018|Categories: ctDNA, Diagnostics Tech, Methods and applications, Other stuff|0 Comments

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 […]

19 02, 2018

CRISPR diagnostics

By | February 19th, 2018|Categories: Diagnostics Tech, Methods and applications|3 Comments

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 […]

14 02, 2018

New products from @10XGenomics #AGBT18 workshop

By | February 14th, 2018|Categories: 10X Genomics, Conferences, Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing|0 Comments

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 […]

3 01, 2018

NGS methods naming discussed in Nature Methods

By | January 3rd, 2018|Categories: Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing|0 Comments

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 […]

24 11, 2017

SPLiT-Seq: single-cell RNA-Seq without the hardware

By | November 24th, 2017|Categories: Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing, Single-cell sequencing|Tags: , , |1 Comment

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 […]

8 11, 2017

Error-corrected ctDNA sequencing for mutation and CNV using UMIs

By | November 8th, 2017|Categories: ctDNA, Exomes and amplicons, Methods and applications, Next-generation sequencing|2 Comments

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 […]

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