Tuesday, June 29, 2021

ONT Sketches Paths to Long, Selective, Accurate Sequencing

Some sort of summary of London Calling in this space is grossly overdue after getting caught by multiple work firedrills and then several recursive rounds of procrastination. I'm not going to attempt to cover all the company announcements.  I'm going to focus on a cluster of announcements that show a long range vision of inexpensive sequencing consisting of very accurate, very long reads.  Well, a cluster of visions -- some parts can be mixed and matched and others cannot. This should be a prospect to grab the attention of any current or aspiring ONT competitors.  Now before I'm accused of being a gullible shill for Oxford, I want to make it clear I think that running the table on these will be technically difficult and is many years in the future.  But  even if Oxford manages some of these but not all, they would substantially upgrade their platform.

Wednesday, June 02, 2021

New Clinical Human Genome Speed Record

I proposed last year that there should be a regular racing event for human genomics.  The only real competitor in is this interesting race seems to be Steven Kingsmore's group at Rady Children's Hospital.  I was sent an embargoed press release from Illumina about a new record by that group, which clocks in at 13.5 hours from patient sample to clinical report. A New England Journal of Medicine paper (hence the embargo, ending just before I post this) reports on the advance but wasn't in the packet I received.