What Is (and Is Not) Sequence Assembly?

In the closing talk of the pre-London Calling workshop, Hans Jansen had closed his presentation with a question whether at some future date sequence assembly would become obsolete.  This was meant to be an aspirational vision for a distance timepoint, but one correspondent on Twitter saw it as hype.  I got in a bit of a discussion, constrained by the dreaded 140 character limit, which ended up largely illustrating that I have a somewhat more restricted definition of assembly than some people.  I'm going to explore this and you can judge for yourself

London Calling 2017: Plant & Animal de novo Genomes

Okay, I'm desperately behind on writing up the external science from London Calling.  Not helpful that I claimed I would not only do so, but in multiple installments.  A number of the plenaries focused on large genome assembly, so that's what I'll tackle now -- plus a few other bits.   See also my Storify summaries, which include other reports on the conference.  Also check out my storifies on the SMRT Leiden conference, which ran at the beginning of the same week and discusses many similar topics.

SFAF & I'm Not Dead Yet Technologies

Jonathan Jacobs posted his annual reminder that the Sequencing, Finishing and Analysis in the Future Meeting (SFAF) will be this week.  Alas, that meeting hasn't had many more tweeters in the past than Jonathan, but perhaps this year there will be more.  There's a glut of genomics conferences to track, compile tweets and opine on -- besides London Calling, there's been SMRT Leiden and Biology of Genomes, all in the span of two weeks!  This post is going to be a bit short on actual writing and more to just flag some talks at SFAF that grabbed my attention.  What I realized is that the talks at SFAF illustrate that a number of technologies I consider effectively dead retain significant attention.

#ImBiased, but… Best conf. of 2017: #SFAF2017 #infectiousdisease #inherited #disease #agrigenomics #human #genomics https://t.co/yTu2MxKc41 pic.twitter.com/FCoSmTp6an

— Jonathan Jacobs (@bioinformer) May 10, 2017

London Calling 2017: A Theme of Consolidation

London Calling 2017 came to a close last Friday.  Any excuses of jet lag or nights running up ONT's bar tab won't hold up much longer, so time to finish this post (I really did start the night after Clive's talk!) I'm going to largely divide coverage on the dividing line of who presented: today's piece on Oxford Nanopore presentations, particularly Clive Brown's, and in the near future at least one focusing on the science users presented.  For other summaries of the action, I've created a storify of just blog posts and similar summaries of the meeting, as there were a great number (and I am on the hunt for additional ones I've missed)

Nanopore Workshop Notes

I attended on Wednesday the London Calling pre-conference workshop, an add-on for those wishing for help getting started with MinION sequencing.  Judging from who I spoke to, many participants were utterly new to nanopore sequencing and more than a few were like me in that they had tried the platform and wanted to do better.  My colleague has gotten some very good results recently, which has re-fired my determination to get good at that myself.  Below are some limited notes I took that may be of general interest. Large portions of the workshop will go largely uncovered, as I focused on what was surprising or new.

London Calling 2017: A Preview

Oxford Nanopore's London Calling confab runs Thursday and Friday, with a training workshop on Wednesday.  I'll be there -- who can resist a conference nearly at the Tower of London? -- and will also be testing whether my personal "field of nanopore sequencing suppression" can defeat ONT's best trainers.  Here's some preview of what I'll be particularly looking for, though being surprised will be lots of fun too. Much more fun that reading (the wrong) patents!

Oxford Nanopore's Enigmatic Patent Litigation

Oxford Nanopore has launched lawsuits in the UK and Germany against Pacific Biosciences, alleging infringement of a European patent licensed from Daniel Branton's lab at Harvard, EP1192453, which is apparently exclusively licensed to Oxford.  When I wrote about Pacific Biosciences first lawsuit against Oxford Nanopore late last year I titled it "PacBio's Quixotic Patent Litigation", as it appeared the Oxford could easily dodge the lawsuit by abandoning the 2D sequencing technology, which Oxford is in the process of doing.  I've swapped in "enigmatic" for this title, as I'm not even sure what aspect of PacBio is allegedly infringing the patent.