Miscellaneous & Disorderly Thoughts on the Eve of London Calling

It's the night before London Calling. I hope to post Thursday, but an after-meeting report won’t be until nest week - I must dash on Friday fir a slightly insane/exhilarating routing to meet my family in Florida for the holiday weekend. Exhilarating as I will have a layover in one of the ancient capitals of Europe, Lisbon, which I’ve never visited. Insane, because it’s a 12 hour overnight layover. Anyway, between the challenge of covering Oxford Nanopore's expanding reach of products and applications and being sleep-addled from taking the redeye flight I'm going to throw out a bunch of thoughts without really trying to fuse them into a coherent narrative.

Should PentaSaturn Buy An iSeq: A Hypothetical Scenario Illustrating Platform Picking

Editorial note: I wrote this in early January, then planned to slot it in after some other items.  Then life knocked me upside the head, then AGBT came along and then it was forgotten.  Once I remember it, I fretted it had gone stale. But I had put a lot of effort into it and really nothing has changed with regard to iSeq, other than it should be shipping now.  Besides, this week is London Calling and so having an Illumina-centric piece could be a bit of useful balance.  So, for your consideration:

Some of the online discussion around this January's iSeq announcement, springing from my piece or elsewhere, explores how the iSeq fits into the sequencing landscape.  In particular, how does it fit in with Illumina's existing MiniSeq and MiSeq and how does it go against Oxford Nanopore's MinION.  For example, in Matthew Herper's Forbes piece, genomics maven Elaine Mardis compares iSeq unfavorably to MiSeq in terms of cost-per-basepair.  I'm a huge believer in fitting sequencing to ones scientific and practical realities and not the other way 'round: no one platform quite fits all situations nor do even the same metrics fit all situations.  So in this piece, I'm going to illustrate what I believe is a plausible scenario in which iSeq would make sense.  Now, I have designed this to play to iSeq's characteristics and very realistically have many dials which I could turn to go in another direction.  Which I will try to note as I go along.

PromethION Racing: A Call To The Post

I was at a get-together yesterday for bioinformatics folks associated with Third Rock Ventures companies at a local pub.  The organizer, who I've known for a number of years, was introducing me with the pleasant "Keith writes a nice blog" -- but then the barb "but he hasn't posted in a while". Ouch! But it hurts because it's true; too many excuses to not write and far too many half-baked ideas and interviews that should be out (or worse, a nearly complete post).  Since it is May, which in the U.S. is bookended by iconic racing events, I'd like to trot out an idea that has been idling for a while: PromethION Racing.