Bell Labs Wasn't Built in a Day. Or Two Years.

Rome is famous for persisting for centuries - and having not been built in a day. If you go there, then one of the most magnificent sites is the most famous sporting arena in the world, the Flavian Amphitheater - better known as the Coliseum. Last week there was colossal news in the biotech world that Arena Bioworks was shutting down, after only two years and $100M spent of its "committed' half billion in funding.  What went wrong?

Nineteen

If I had been more atop things, I would have written this just under a week ago, on the nineteenth anniversary of my starting to write in this space.  That's a milestone, and actually writing something is the way to try to push back towards some regular frequency in posting here.  But the real reason for the title is something I've mused on a small bit for many of those years: can we shave one amino acid out of the proteome?

ASHG Posters: The Agony and The Ecstasy

ASHG is a huge meeting, probably the second largest I've ever attended after ASCO.  ASBMB is similar in size perhaps, though I think a hair smaller and definitely a bigger than ESHG.  And certainly multiple AGBTs in scale.  And that is crashing in on me now.

PacBio: $300 Genome Via Chemistry Update

ASHG is here in Boston, just down the street from Ginkgo's HQ.  I'm in a new role in Ginkgo Automation, trying to convince the NGS world that our automation platform is the bee's knees.  So excellent timing.  In advance of the meeting I was able to grab 30 minutes of PacBio CEO Christian Henry's time - last time I saw him he was fresh out of the legendary midnight AGBT  ILMN vs. PACB doubles beer pong match.  Christian gave me a heads up on some of the product news that hit the wires a bit earlier this morning. At the top of that is a new version of the core chemistry, SPRQ-Nx, which boosts yields 10-15% as well as the official launch of flowcell reuse.

Ship of ThesION

10X Scoops Scale

News broke this afternoon that microfluidics single cell genomics leader 10X Genomics has bought out split-pool single cell company Scale Biosciences for $30 million up front in cash and stock, with additional payments of undisclosed amounts if certain milestones are reached.  

Could It Have Been Found With Short Reads?

Initially, the ESHG program was overwhelming.  With the exception of the official opening and closing sessions, every timeslot had multiple parallel sessions - and sometimes those also had competing corporate sessions.  Everything would be recorded and available for playback through November.  That took some pressure off "did I pick the wrong session?", but also is a double-edged sword - I might be attending ESHG for half a year! So I decided that my focus would be rare diseases, and if competing sessions on rare diseases then the one that most focused on genomics technology.  And that led to hearing what amounted to a refrain in the questions at the end of each long read talk: could this causative variant have been found by short reads?