Pro Tip: Customer Hostile is Never A Good Look

A bizarre incident happened on Twitter yesterday.  Someone contemplating using Oxford Nanopore to sequence a large, complex genome on a tight budget was asking technical questions about whether to optimize their libraries for overall yield or long inserts, and was getting useful advice from some of the top academic scientists who have propelled ONT forward.  One of them suggested using Circulomics products, and that was followed by an ominous yet vague warning from an ONT employee.  But not just any ONT employee, but Chief Strategy Officer Spike Willcocks.  Having not seen a retraction of that tweet, I'm here to point out just how self-defeating the warning is.

Parse Bio Pools Further Funding

Seattle-based single cell analysis firm Parse Bio is announcing this morning a $41.5M Series B round of funding, pushing their total raise just over $50M.  Parse uses chemical fixation to lock biomolecules onto their enclosing cells or nuclei, which can then be manipulated without releasing their contents.  This enables a series of split-label-pool operations to tag the molecules of interest with barcodes so that in the end each cell has a unique barcode.  The protocol requires no specialized instrument, enables collecting samples over different timepoints while quenching changes in gene expression and can scale to very high cell numbers. Co-founders Alex Rosenberg and Charlie Roco sat down with me over Zoom last week to review the company and their technology.