Covaris Grabs A Spot on the Liquid Handler Deck

For as long as I can remember, Covaris has been the standard in DNA shearing for high throughput short read sequencing.  Their benchtop units had their quirks -- custom tubes being the foremost -- but they were what everyone else compared to.  In 2013 when the American Society for Human Genetics was in town, the PacBio folks did me a great favor and loaned me an exhibit hall pass.  Multiple companies were offering DNA shearing instruments -- and every one compared themselves against Covaris.  Now they have a new offering, moving the instrument onto a liquid handling robot deck so that it is available for high-throughput workflows.  Covaris invited me down to their Woburn, Massachusetts facility to get a look at the instrument before its formal launch at the SLAS conference

Patent Dive: Genapsys

Here's a dangerous statement for me: I actually enjoyed reading some patents recently.  Now, before you get any ideas in your head about suggesting more patents for me to read, let me be clear that these were unusual patents -- they're written to be read! -- and were read under strict conditions. The patents in question are from Genapsys -- found via my good friend Justia.

Metabolic Whac-a-Mole

Derek Lowe summarized a really cool paper back in October.  I've been meaning to grab a copy, but discovered recently that the MIT library no longer has an easy way for outsiders to slip in an use their subscriptions.  So I'm working off his summary, but since this is mostly an excuse for flights of genetic fantasy actually reading the paper would probably just hinder me!

2019 Tech Speculations: Oxford Nanopore

As promised in the last post, I'm segregating out Oxford Nanopore.  Admittedly I tend to cover them relatively closely -- though I never seem to quite finish writing up their conferences -- but at the moment ONT is the only major player in the U.S. research sequencing market not being run out of (or about to be run out of) Illumina HQ.  And I'll be very to the point: ONT has a lot of balls in the air and irons in the fire, but from my point-of-view what matters most is rapid and regular progress on the accuracy front.

2019 Sequencing Tech Speculations: Will We Actually See New Entrants?

An astute reader caught a sentence fragment about MGI in last night's Illumina JPM roundup -- the unfortunate evidence of a a mental battle over whether to put any further comments on MGI in an Illumina-centric post. So now I'll sweep that bit into a general post about not-Illumina (and not-Oxford, that will go in yet another).

Illumina JPM Talk

Illumina CEO Francis deSouza delivered his J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference talk (webcast audio, slides & Q&A audio) a week ago.  I can claim that some of my speculations came true -- just the most boring and obvious ones.  Overall, the presentation was the talk of a confident market leader.

2019 Sequencing Tech Speculations, Part I: Illumina & MGI

Next week is the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.  It's striking this year the paucity of companies in the genomics space -- Illumina on Mondayat 6:00 EST and MGI on Wednesday at 5:30 EST and Nanostring at 6:30 EST on Wednesday.  Perhaps NVIDIA will say something interesting about their forays into healthcare, such as providing the chops for real time nanopore basecalling, on Thursday at 11:30 EST. There's also some nice polls from Albert Viella on Twitter

What would you like @illumina to announce at #JMP2019 ? https://t.co/TDn5J0glhi part 2

— Albert Vilella (@AlbertVilella) January 5, 2019

and some more Twitter speculation

Predictions for @Illumina #JPM2019. Besides PacBio news, expecting NovaSeq SP 2x250. Any longer S4 kit or potential S5 would require upgraded onboard storage. Really hoping no new NovaSeq system.

— CAT at UCSF (@CAT_UCSF) January 4, 2019

So, before all the beans are spilled, here's some of the speculations and ponderings I've been entertaining about the sequencing technology field for 2019 for Illumina and MGI.  I'll cover some of the other players in the next few days, but since Illumina is up on Monday that's the priority!

2019 Resolutions

2019 is upon us; I'm hoping it will be a bit less eventful than 2018.  It wasn't all bad -- I took two trips that delivered scenery I have only right to see once in a lifetime -- but it was essentially bookended by losing my father and a revolution in my workplace.  Mixed in there is the bittersweet pride of seeing one's offspring graduate from high school and proceed on to college.

New Year's resolutions are notoriously difficult to keep -- one is fighting entrenched behaviors -- but bringing in some external pressure might help.  So I'll make my two resolutions for the year very public: that I post here more regularly and that I read more non-fiction books to the end.  And the hope is that you, dear reader, if you meet me, feel free to pointedly inquire about my adherence.  Or hit me via Twitter!