My lab has been a long-time user of Illumina’s transposase exomes for the very simple reason that the 50ng input has been the lowest on the market for number of years*. This made it attractive for cancer samples where we are really limited on DNA availability; […]
Because HPV has such a small and relatively simple genome (8,000 bp encoding 8 genes) it is possible to screen for genetic variation that may underly carcinogenesis. A team from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has just published the sequencing of over 5,570 human cell and tissue samples – […]
A short article in todays Times quotes William Cowley parchment makers as saying velum provides the only foolproof way for detecting art forgery. Very simply an artist creates their work on vellum and retains a sample for genetic comparison should a suspected forgery come to […]
The Ecker lab at the Salk Institute published a method for very high-throuphut transcription factor analysis in Nature Protocols yesterday: Mapping genome-wide transcription-factor binding sites using DAP-seq. The method is elegantly simple in its concept; PCR-free libraries from native gDNA are hybridised with affinity-tagged in vitro-expressed transcription factors, […]
A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports from Maurice Jansen’s group at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam presents ctDNA analysis by targeted NGS from just 250pg of input cfDNA . This is a very small amount of material, and although the authors do discuss […]
The Genomics England project (a.k.a. UK100k genomes) is known as a whole genome sequencing project. It aims to sequence 100,000 genomes from UK NHS patients with Rare Disease or Cancer. But Genomics England have a very nice tool for people interested in targeted sequencing via […]
Index-swapping appears to be driven by excess adapter/primer (Illumina whitepaper). The take-home messages are 1) to use UDIs (unique dual-indexes), and 2) clean-up your libraries to remove left-over adapter/primer. Later in this post I’m going to work through one solution for getting rid of any remaining adapter/primer in an NGS library; but […]
When will nanopore sequencing push short-reads (i.e. Illumina) off their pedestal? According to Clive PromethION is the Illumina killer…but this same conversation was going on many times at London Calling. I wanted to highlight two areas that might be about to flip to ONTs advantage […]
Last week I followed up on the index-swapping issue after Illumina released their white paper and also covered what Ethan Linck at The Molecular Ecologist had posted about the Sinha et al BioRxiv paper. In that post I said I’d write a follow-up post about index design over the weekend – here it is! […]
Illumina released a white paper this week describing their efforts to understand the index-swapping issues with the ExAmp chemistry. This story has been covered many times and got lots of Tweets in the days since the BioRxiv paper from Stanford was uploaded. Megan Molteni at Wired wrote a lengthy […]
