Illumina continue to push hard on making DNA sequencing cheaper and easier to access for everyone. The announcements at last night’s JP Morgan included a smaller X Ten, HiSeq 3000/4000 and NextSeq 550. I’m not going into much detail about the instruments, you can get […]
There is a whole big noisy discussion going on around the regulation of NGS tests, which has been covered in some detail by GenomeWeb and other bloggers. My lab does not develop tests, but I have a real interest in seeing how NGS is being […]
Shortly after writing my post on Authorship and acknowledgement of core facility work I was pointed to the GATC Top publications of 2014. Here GATC list the papers where their sequencing (and other) services have been used and acknowledged.Congratulations GATC: four Nature and one Cancer […]
Have a great Christmas break…hope to see you in 2015. James.
Two major problems are encountered by researchers wanting to analyse circulating tumour DNA; contamination by gDNA from white blood cells; and the relatively low amount of circulating DNA. Because of this the protocols used for blood collection and circulating DNA extraction are critical. This post […]
I’ve been lucky enough to work in an Institute that views its core facilities as a cornerstone of the scientific output, and we get acknowledged for most of the work we do. Other core facilities are not so lucky; and even here sometimes people simply […]
Fred Sanger – Double Nobel Laureate: A Biography.Author: George G. Brownlee.Publisher: Cambridge University Press (2014) ISBN: 9781107083349Fred Sanger’s biography has been written by his one-time PhD student, and long time collaborator, George Brownlee. Fred (I’ll refer to him by his first name as I think […]
Congratulations to Marc Tischkowitz and colleagues for getting into Altmetrics Top 100 papers of the year. Their NEJM paper on increase risk of breast cancer in loss-of-function PALB2 carriers was number 87 and one of two papers from the University of Cambridge.The Altmetric Top 100 […]
Clinical sequencing is looming and recently I’ve heard more, and better, arguments for using whole genomes. These have mainly focused on the quality of PCR-free genomes, which have uniform coverage and few regions of missing or very low coverage. Compared to the PCR and hybridisation-capture […]
New research at the LMB (across the road from the Institute I work in) has demonstrated how alternate “genetic polymers” can be used in place of DNA and RNA: Synthetic Genetic Polymers Capable of Heredity and Evolution. XNAs [xeno-nucleic acids] use nucleotide analgoues, and the […]
