Epigenetics is one of the most exciting areas of research and promises to impact all sorts of biological systems. DNA methylation has recently been shown to come in methylcytosine (mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) flavours. Usually analysis of mC is carried out using bisulfite conversion or […]
Geoff Smith from Illumina presented a great piece of work his group have been collaborating on with Jill Banfield’s research group at the University of California Berkely, Department of Earth and Planetary sciences. Geoff included a discussion on their use of Moleculo.They have been using […]
The use of NGS in forensics is likely to supplant current STR profiling. One issue that has been discussed is the need to robustly determine that the correct sample has been analysed and reported on. With NGS almost all sequencing today is being done in […]
We have been running Nextera in my lab for a while now and had some great success e.g. 600x C. elegans genomes. With the release of Illumina’s rapid exome kits Nextera is proving to be a versatile and useful addition to our lab tools. Unfortunately […]
Illumina’s just announced a partnership with major automation vendors so their s-bot looks like it has been killed as a project. We’ve got a Tecan Evo in our lab and would like to use it for library prep but a major headache has been the […]
RNA-seq is getting very cool over in Sweden’s SciLifeLab. A recent press release announces that Joakim Lundeberg (Royal Institute of Technology) Jonas Frisén and Patrik StÃ¥hl (Karolinska Institutet) were awarded £1.8M from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to study Brain biology. They have developed […]
One of the great things about ENCODE was the amount of effort put into standardising how different groups did their experiments. As any core manager knows a good SOP is a huge step to high-quality data. The ENCODE consortium put together guidelines for ChIP, RNA […]
Monitoring of cancer patients is an important part of their treatment and this is traditionally done with tests like Computed Tomography imaging (CT) or biomarker analysis. NGS of cancer amplicons, exomes and/or genomes is being discussed as a realistic addition, and possibly an alternative, to […]
Mate-Pair sequencing has been used from the early days of genome sequencing to help with final assembly. The technique creates libraries with much larger inserts than the standard fragment library prep, even 10Kb or more. However making these libraries has never been easy and the […]
Someone recently asked me “How do SPRI beads work” and I realised I was not completely sure so I went to find out. My lab uses kits. Lots and lots of kits; kits for DNA extraction, kits for PCR, kits for NGS library prep […]
