An Oscar Night Request

I've tried pretty hard to keep this blog focused on all the omics, but occasionally take the license to stray to my other interests, primarily one of them.  Tonight is the Oscars, and I have a plea for the movie industry.  Now, I realize the overlap between readership of this space and the big wigs in Hollywood is tiny, but perhaps a friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-spouse-of-a-sibling of a reader can make a difference.  It is this simple: you have less than two years to get off your rears and launch a Blu-Ray 30th anniversary edition of an Oscar-winning picture.

Why Oxford Nanopore Needs to Release Some Data Pronto (Besides Bailing Me Out)

Last week's piece on Oxford Nanopore got a lot of attention and a lot of comments, which to me is the true mark of success in this space (discounting the higher than normal spam attempts).  A couple of folks were kind enough to tweet a link (now captured in Nick Loman's wonderful tweet archives for AGBT 2012), and it was also picked up by Matthew Herper at Forbes, Dan Kobolt at MassGenomics and others (apologies for all I haven't shouted out).  It also can't be denied that some of those comments felt I had been too generous / gullible with Oxford Nanopore

Oxford Nanopore Doesn't Disappoint

Oxford Nanopore's AGBT presentation should have just finished up, so the embargo is off.  Oxford was kind enough to chat with me last night and to share their press release in advance; on the call were CTO Clive Brown, SAB member Ewan Birney and Director of Communications Zoe McDougall.  A real challenge posed by Oxford's news is trying to write about it without slipping into clichéd techspeak about what they will be releasing later this year ("second half").

2012: Enter the Nanopores?

This summer will make it twenty years since I first heard of the concept of nanopore sequencing.  A very affable post-doc in George Church's lab was starting some experiments in the concept.  Unbeknownst to any of us, another group at Harvard in the Biolabs (Dan Branton's) was also working on a nanopore sequencing technology.  In the time since then, the field has generated many papers and much speculation, but no workable sequencer.  I had started joking a few years ago that nanopores were the monorails of sequencing: always the technology of the future.  To be a bit more fair, nanopores had started to resemble nuclear fusion, a tantalizing vision always just out of technological reach.