I’m going to start this post by saying something that may be controversial “splicing analysis is a niche, strandedness is useful in a minority of cases and that most RNA-seq users are only interested in getting Affy-like 3′ biased differential gene expression data”.I’m constantly looking […]

An awesome demonstration of what’s possible when people think outside the box: Highly Multiplexed Subcellular RNA Sequencing in Situ in Science this week demonstrates in situ RNA-seq of single cells. FISSEQ (fluorescent in situ RNA sequencing) was developed in the lab of George Church who’s […]

The most recent ctDNA paper verifies its utility as a “broadly applicable, sensitive, and specific biomarker†across “multiple different types of cancer†and useful in cancer research and medicine: Detection of Circulating Tumor DNA in Early- and Late-Stage Human Malignancies
 by Bettegowda et al Sci […]

Jacques Retief (Sr. Manager Scientific Affairs at Illumina) has produced a phenomenal poster with graphics for over NGS 50 methods. If you’ve ever wanted to know how MAINE-seq, smMIP, ATAC-seq or just about anything else worked then Jaques helpfully provides a graphic of each method […]

Illumina now have a sequencer for almost every need: S, M, L & XL. There is a helpful table on their website that give instrument specs and an application-by-application estimate of sample numbers that can be sequenced in run:Interestingly gene panel’s don’t appear on HiSeq […]

Illumina surprised pretty much everyone with their latest SBS chemistry. I was at an Illumina meeting last week where it was discussed at some length, with many in the audience concerned about possible new error modes due to the drastic change compared to the four-colour […]

We just published a paper describing the tool we use in my lab as the primary QC for all lanes of sequencing, we’ve used this tool on about 5000-6000 samples over th past 3-4 years.Multi-genome alignment for quality control and contamination screening of next-generation sequencing […]

Onto the next new instrument from Illumina, the NextSeq 500, I’ve given a brief overview but covered the new chemistry in an earlier post.Illumina helpfully provide the NextSeq 500 User guide on their website. There is a lot of interesting reading in it and I’ve […]

NextSeq 500 uses a two-colour chemistry rather than the original four-colours. This makes a massive difference to the complexity of producing reagents, the instrumentation and the computation; all are effectively reduced by a factor of two. So how does it work?Update 290114: I got confirmation […]