A couple of Tweets today point to the amazing lengths Oxford Nanopores MinION sequencer is capable of generating – over 400kb! Dominik Handler Tweeted a plot showing read distribution from a run . In replies following the Tweet he describes the DNA handling as […]
The UK recently approved an NIPT test to screen high risk pregnancies for foetal trisomy 21, 13, or 18 after the current primary screening test, and in place of amniocentesis (following on from the results of the RAPID study). I am 100% in favour of […]
DeciBio have a great interactive Tableau dashboard which you can use to browse and filter their analysis of 97 “laboratory biomarker analysis†ImmunOncolgy clinical trials; see: Diagnostic Biomarkers for Cancer Immunotherapy – Moving Beyond PD-L1. The raw data comes from ClinicalTrials.gov where you can specify […]
Next-generation sequencing is fantastic technology and its use has revolutionised our understanding of biology, but it is not perfect, multiple issues occur in every lab from sample extraction through to the actual sequencing. Not all of these are well enough understood to be safely ignored […]
Foundation Medicine were yestoday granted US Patent 9,340,830 “Optimization of Multigene Analysis of Tumor Samples”. This is likely to stir up the can of worms that is tumour testing by NGS and is another patent in a complex landscape. The claims basically cover WGS library […]
Illumina’s X Ten was a major announcement. It arguably delivered the “$1000 genome”, kickstarted national population genomics as a science, and delivered the final blow to Complete Genomics. It is debatable as to whether Illumina needed to release X Ten at $1000, or with such […]
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 […]
