Genomes, exomes, panels. Patients, doctors and the general public are hearing about things that simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. IO therapy is big news but TMB, a likely biomarker for immunotherapy response, is a simple concept often poorly explained. It is clear that a […]
GenomeWeb carry coverage of the work by Battelle Memorial Institute, Harvard University, Virginia Tech, and Ginkgo Bioworks who are all developing methods to detect sequences that could “be put to nefarious use”. This suggests a couple of things to me. First and foremost are these companies […]
Illumina released a new NovaSeq flowcell today: S Prime (SP). This allows users to run a very small number of samples and is much more akin to a HiSeq flowcell; one SP flowcells generates 1.6 billion reads or about 4-5 lanes of a HiSeq. It […]
An interesting round up of the Top 10 Sequencing Companies from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News highlights the dominance of Illumina on the life-sciences (genomics) industry. Illumina’s $2.752 billion in 2017 is almost double the combined revenue of the other 9 companies ($1.445 billion). With giants […]
Andrew Adey’s group at OHSU published sci-MET – a single cell method for whole-genome methylation analysis in Nature Biotech last month: Highly scalable generation of DNA methylation profiles in single cells. In this they described their indexing method and report on an analysis of over 3000 […]
“It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts!” Turns out that the first statement very much does matter when it comes to cell free DNA. It is becoming clearer that the size of cfDNA and ctDNA is information that […]
Last night I watched in amazement as a beating heart was brought into the UK for transplant surgery – the heart was kept alive in the OCS HEART system. The BBC program Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live is outstanding TV and if you can […]
On Friday last week I had the pleasure of hosting a half-day Nanostring symposium at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute (my previous employer). The symposium was arranged as an opportunity to get Nanostring users, and potential users, together to hear about the exciting developments in […]
The FDA issued a safety communication today on the risk that biotin supplements “can significantly interfere with certain lab tests and cause incorrect test results”. The FDA communiqué mentions an increase in reported adverse events, and even one death, because of Biotin interference. Biotin interferes with some […]
For readers of this blog who don’t remember The X-files the reference may be lost on you, but the work published in Genome Research today will not. In Whole-genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia Gary Nolan’s group at Stanford report on […]
