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 […]
I wanted to let you readers of my blog that a huge change is coming for me. At the end of February 2018 I’ll be leaving my job here at CRUK and am joining Astra Zeneca as the Director of a new R&D group. My time at CRUK […]
Anyone who’s run Illumina instruments over the years is likely to have noticed how flowcells can have remarkably similar (and occasionally amusing) names. This can create a real headache when looking for a specific run as a single mismatch can cause you to spend some time […]
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 […]
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 […]
In this post I wanted to highlight the wonderful “Excel vs R: A Brief Introduction to R” by Jesse Sadler. This is full of useful and practical advice on using R in place of Excel (or any other spreadsheet) for simple data analysis. I use […]
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 – […]
The news about Harvey Weinstein can hardly have escaped the attention of even the most lab-bound post-doc ro PhD student. The investigative journalism at the The New York Times story has led to the downfall of a movie mogul for sexual harassment, unwanted physical contact and other things most of us […]
Hopefully this post is going to pop up as if by magic to all my LinkedIn contacts. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and finally had a go. Thanks to the people at WPBeginner for writing this “how to guide” to make […]
