I’ve been a big fan of Illumina’s BaseSpace since it was launched in late 2011. It was the first truly simple to access and free to use cloud-based analysis infrastructure for NGS data. I’ve used it a lot – primarily for run monitoring, but also […]

Last year I posted about the Lander-Waterman equation used to calculate the number of reads needed to sequence a sample. I explained that this general equation (C = LN/G) can be rearranged to allow you to compute the number of reads (N) to sequence a […]

SPRI beads, generally in the form of AMPureXP beads, are almost ubiquitous in genomics applications such as library prep for NGS. The most popular thing I’ve ever written was a post on this blog four years ago: “How do SPRI beads work?” with almost 100,000 […]

I met two dads last night, one a junior doctor picking his daughter up from the same Karate class my son; the other, a consultant, at the pub after a long day (covering for junior doctors). Both of them spoke about the junior doctors strike […]

I’ve just started using Twitter polls and kicked things off with a couple asking followers whether they thought Cancer research (or diagnostics) is best investigated using whole genome sequencing, higher depth exomes, much higher depth amplicomes, or even long-reads. Please do take the poll and […]

We recently bought two HiSeq 4000 instruments to run larger RNA-seq and exome projects on. Over the next few months we’ll be transitioning other library types where we can, and think perhaps 65-85% of the work we do can be ported over from the 2500. […]

I thought I’d post a brief update on a story from last year where I was alerted by @MattiasAine via one of my TwitterBots about a group ripping off his Karlsson 2014 paper. The evidence was pretty damning – almost identical data, analysis, and figures […]

I’ve just posted an advert for a Principal Scientific Associate to join the Genomics Core as the Deputy Manager. This is going to be a key position in the team as we’re building building our single-cell genomics capabilities. We’re looking for someone with a PhD […]

Eric Minikel is lead author on a paper that came out in STM in January: Quantifying prion disease penetrance using large population control cohorts. The story is an incredibly personal one involving his wife Sonia, which Eric documents at the cureFFI.org blog. The paper reports […]

The ability to sequence DNA from a Guthrie card e.g. genomic or methylomic analysis (also see my post from last Summer) makes their more routine use in cancer genomics studies attractive. An area that would be great to see developed is the extraction of the […]