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 […]
Last week the first issue of a new journal debuted: The CRISPR Journal. With a massive number of journals out there why should any of us care about a new one? I would not normally read the first issue of a Journal (although I did […]
Two papers in Science last week show how CRISPR can be used as a diagnostic tool. The first comes from the same team at The Broad that brought us the SHERLOCK method, the second from Jennifer Dounda’s group at Berkley. Both methods promise simple diagnostics […]
The 10XGenomics workshop just closed at AGBT and they announced some truly revolutionary new applications: single-cell feature barcoding, single-cell ATAC-Seq and single-cell CNV (feat CBGB). I’ll go through each of these in more detail below but I wanted to start by highlighting the success of single-cell analysis […]
Can transplant genomics help better understand ctDNA? Circulating cell free (cfDNA) of tumour (ctDNA) is released by apoptotic and necrotic cells into blood and other bodily fluids. It has transformed NIPT and is transforming Cancer medicine. However the biology behind it’s release is still not […]
Indexed sequencing is vital to the delivering cost-effective, and statistically robust, experiments. Nearly all non-WGS projects are indexed to some degree so understanding how the indexing works is useful; fortunately Illumina produced this handy guide for users: Indexed sequencing overview. After indexed sequencing our reads […]
iSeq! Illumina’s newest sequencer is the iSeq 100 and costs just $19.5k. Expect 4 million reads, up to 1.2 Gb, in 9-17 hours (approximately 2-3 minute cycle times estimated from the iSeq specifications). This is the deliverable from Project Firefly first mentioned by Jay Flatley at […]
JP Morgan kicks off today and there are sure to be lots of exciting announcements by many of the life science companies we’re all using. I’m particularly interested to hear about new developments in the diagnostics space as my new job is going to be […]
There’s a great paper from Pete Skene, postdoc 2011-2017 in the Henikoff lab, on eLife: An efficient targeted nuclease strategy for high-resolution mapping of DNA binding sites. The paper describes a novel method that performs as well as ChIP-Seq, but with lower background and false-positives. ChIP-seq is […]
