The Commercial End for Fluidigm Technology?

Last week brought news that Standard Biotools, which is what Fluidigm morphed into, is being acquired by Treeline Biosciences, a drug developer.  The deal values Standard at about its cash position - and Treeline made it immediately clear this is a reverse merger to grab the cash and in effect go public by also grabbing Standard's stock listing.  What Treeline has made very clear is that they have absolutely no interest in is Standard's existing tools portfolio.

Long Reads for Rare Diseases Hits New England Journal of Medicine

Alexander Hoischen and colleagues have a brief piece in New England Journal of Medicine that published early this morning, in conjunction with the European Society of Human Genomics (ESHG) meeting.  I'm now in the thrall of ESHG FOMO - I attended last year in part because it was immediately after London Calling and it seemed silly not to extend my trip (plus Alex had asked me personally to go), but this year I reluctantly decided my travel load was getting high and decided to make only one transatlantic flight in the May-June timeframe.  Hopefully I picked the right one.  The piece is the latest installment of a long running program to demonstrate that long read sequencing, specifically PacBio HiFi sequencing, can replace a battery of older tests when trying to diagnose rare genetic diseases.

Craig Venter Reflections: Building & Redesigning Genomes

The last bit of Craig Venter's career a followed, often a bit green with envy, was his work to build genomes.  This all revolved around the Mycoplasma genitalium they had knocked out a genome as a victory lap after completing the first bacterial genome.  This bug is held up as the bacterium with the smallest genome which can be grown in a defined medium.  To first reconstruct an entire genome, with watermarking sequences to prove it was done, required pushing every limit of the existing gene synthesis cloning technology.  An effort so intense, that collaborator Dan Gibson became a verb! (See that gene cluster we want?  We'll Gibson it into a BAC vector.")

Craig Venter Reflections: Human Genome

Few bombshells have hit genomics like the day in May 1998 when Craig Venter and Applied Biosystems announced he would be launching Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome by a complete shotgun approach.  A couple of colleagues at Millennium had just announced they were leaving to form a contract research organization which would perform high throughput sequencing on demand - they were certainly rocked back on their heels (though not blown over; Orion Genomics remains successful to this day with a focus on palm oil genomes).  The public project was also rattled - Celera was promising to deliver a private genome much sooner.  In some ways, it was the EST brouhaha all over again - except with important twists.

Craig Venter Reflections: Small Genomes

In the early 1990s, Craig Venter left the NIH over disputes around the patenting of ESTs.  Investors backed him, but then William Haseltine basically pushed him out of direct operation of Human Genome Sciences (HGS) and Venter went to start The Institute for Genome Research, far better known as TIGR.  TIGR would attract an amazing array of talent both wet lab and dry lab - a pattern that Venter had established.  I believe it was around then that Venter attracted both Clyde Hutchinson and Hamilton Smith to TIGR - two giants of microbiology (Smith had a Nobel Prize!), and they would collaborate with him for the rest of their lives.  HGS would have human biology to themselves, but TIGR was free to explore other parts of life domain.  And it would be in the sequencing of microbes that Venter and TIGR would radically shake up a world that, as I reviewed in the previous piece, was debating how many levels of physical maps to build.

Craig Venter's Genomics Revolution: Setting the Stage

I am overdue in getting back to my very personal review of how the recently passed J. Craig Venter made a huge impact on genomics science.  But especially after being at London Calling, I worry that many in genomics today just won't have the context to grasp how unusual his approaches were.  I met some amazing graduate students there - and most likely they were born after the joint announcement by Venter and Francis Collins of the human genome initial completion.  So with the risk of writing a "back in my day we walked uphill to school both ways" piece, I wish to sketch a debate that the genomics world was having in the early days of the Human Genome Project.

FoG to Roll into Boston Seaport Wednesday & Thursday

The Festival of Genomics, Biodata and AI - thankfully known as FoG and not FogBA or FogBDA - will be at the Boston convention center this Wednesday and Thursday.  It's an interesting conference that typically has two editions each year, one in London and one here in Boston.  I'll be wandering around the floor part of both days - my beacon/hat to be announced on LinkedIn and Twitter that day (leaning hard towards my yellow University of Delaware hat).  FoG works hard to not be your average scientific conference, and I'd like to run down a few things I'm anticipating.   By the way, the world's largest autonomous lab is less than a mile from the conference site and tours are available during the conference - all you need to do is reach out to the tour coordinator to schedule one.  And I'm that, so DM me on LinkedIn and I can set you up.

London Calling: Long-Term R&D

Now to run through the long term technical projections from Oxford Nanopore's Tech Talk.  Well, projection is probably not the correct word - hints and teasers might be closer to the mark.  None of these pronouncements came with any hint of timing for when the community might be able to access them - indeed, CSO Lakmal Jayasinghe made it very clear that this section would have no timing information.  Here is a link to the presentation: what is covered in this piece starts around the 44:40 mark.

London Calling: ONT's Near Term Launches

I returned from London Calling 2026 much as I usually have - exhausted, more than a little hoarse, happy for discussions had and ruing connections missed.  The meeting felt much like prior ones, except in all the ways it was a little different.  The company continues its trajectory towards restraint and corporate maturity, with new CEO Francis Van Parys for the first time exhibiting his "evolution not revolution" messaging for the company's direction.  ONT's technical presentation was divided into two parts: near term that came with release dates = none of them even as distant as the end of the summer - and long term which had no hint of timing.  This piece will focus on the near term advancements and a separate one will cover the long term updates.  The entire presentation is already available on YouTube.

London Calling 2026 Preview

My series on Craig Venter is on a small pause since I didn't get it out before I arrived here in London for Oxford Nanopore's annual shindig at Old Billingsgate.  On the plus side (well, I hope my readers find it a plus), I've sketched out an additional piece - I realized that our world of fast whole genome sequencing powered by long read technologies such as Oxford Nanopore may make it challenging for many to remember the genomics world of the 1990s and how there were great differences in opinion on how to go about sequencing genomes.  But back to London Calling - this is an interesting moment in the history of the company and it shows in the program. So without more ado, here are some key topics and questions on my mind.

Personal Reflections on Craig Venter: Expressed Sequence Tags

Venter's big Expressed Sequence Tag - soon known as ESTs -  paper came out in June during my final summer as an intern; I photocopied it at my internship. I looked it up, and it had only a bit over 600 sequences - a small beginning to what would become an industry-wide exercise.  That was a momentous time for me, as only the past December had I pivoted from thinking I would get a degree in experimental plant molecular biology to focusing on computational genomics. Venter was not the first person to feed an RNA library into a DNA sequencing workflow without prior screening; I believe Gregor Sutcliffe holds that milestone.  But Venter did it on a much larger scale and with much more flash.  He pitched it as a way to skim the cream of the human genome when the official Human Genome Project was just getting going.  And as would characterize much of his career, it is the response of others in the community that was as much his contribution as his own work.

Personal Reflections on Craig Venter: Preface

Craig Venter's sudden passing has triggered many writings about his life and work.  I'm overdue on my own personal reflections, and am breaking them into three thematic pieces. While I only met him a few times and never one-on-one, his career had an enormous impact on mine. So I am going to write a series of posts this week reviewing, in a very personal way, Venter's enormous impact on genomics and synthetic biology. I'm sure I won't do it proper justice, and I won't be surprised if my memory plays tricks on me - please do point out any egregious errors of fact and feel free to contest my opinions if you feel they are unfounded.

If My Agent Can't See Your Catalog, Will It Exist Much Longer?

Another edition of my dabbling with AI.  Somewhat like what I reported before - a customer asked if Ginkgo Cloud Lab's Echo-MS option could configure an assay to replicate the analytical results in a published paper, so I'm using Claude to do the heavy lifting.  Plus part of what I described earlier showed some issues on review.  But the big thing I'm keying into this morning is Claude is having difficulty with accessing a major chemical catalog I pointed it at - and I wonder how long that situation will be tenable.  Maybe not for a big company, but how many small companies will have an existential crisis when it turns out AI co-scientists and full agentic scientists have been silently passing them by?

Crossing the Vibicon

Vibe coding - solving problems by extended conversation with a machine learning program rather than writing the code yourself - is all the rage.  But I hadn't really been partaking, finding one excuse after another.  I don't have time.  It's a lazy approach to the craft I've honed.  Abandonment of my skills.   But I've also taken to referring to myself as a "lapsed computational biologist", as I was never doing any coding - or looking at biological data.  I'm business development now, which is a bit of a euphemism for salesperson.  Still, a bit of a pang - and all of my colleagues were vibing away.  And then an old friend/colleague said they fed my recent column on LinkedIn to an AI and it generated code to replicate my little parser  - and this colleague has never programmed!  He sent me the code, which I've skimmed but not tested - looks about right.  And so confession time - I have drunk from the well of vibe coding and do not plan to stop drinking from it anytime soon

An artistic depiction of Julius Caesar's transgression, pulled from Wikimedia

Invivoscribe PrepQuant: Streamlining Clinical DNA Extraction

The liquid biopsy space continues to grow and heat up - just this week Roche's Foundation Medicine unit announced the acquisition of Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) test developer Saga Diagnostics for just over a half billion dollars.  Numerous MRD and Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) companies continue to spring up, with even more analyte types - first it was cell-free DNA, but now cell-free RNA and exosomes have entered the picture and probably a bunch more.  Extracting DNA from biofluids - mostly plasma, but sometimes urine or something else - is a critical step with many available methods - and many of those are labor intensive or incompletely automated.  As testing volumes scale, there will be a need to reduce the hands-on effort both to keep costs down and consistency up.  Just before AACR, Invivoscribe unveiled a new instrument for cell-free DNA purification and quantification which intends to reduce hands on time significantly over existing methods.

AGBT Agriculture 2026: A Few Paragraphs on Graphs

AGBT Agriculture was a really nice meeting - lovely venue in the Arizona desert, a meeting size that you felt you could (but weren't compelled to) introduce yourself to everyone, good food, great scientific content, and everyone super-friendly.  I came for the workshops on Sunday, and there were two on graph genomes / pangenomes.  Which was a theme throughout the meeting - not every talk or paper mentioned these topics, but a huge fraction did.  The agriculture world - both plant and animal (hmmm, no mushroom talks that I can recall) - is completely sold on the utility of graph genomes.  Ideally really large ones not only capturing the complete genomic diversity of a species, but also layering in information from related species so that the graph can service questions of when particular genomic features arose in evolution.

Flowers: A Matter of Timing

I'm headed over to AGBT Agriculture tomorrow, after getting to Phoenix ahead of time to check out some sights.  The Desert Botanical Garden is amazing, particularly since it stays open until 10pm and so you can watch the lighting change as the sun sets and then enjoy some artistic artificial lighting on some of the trails.  Before I left, a few daffodils were in bloom back at my home.  So while I have plants on the mind, I'll unleash another plant engineering fantasy but this time with a dose of contemplation whether it would really be a good idea.  What if we could engineer flowers to show up at any time we wanted?

A Wish For Snail-Inspired Tulips

About a year ago we took a family vacation to the Netherlands with a prime goal to see tulips - and tulips we did see!  Even a rainy day (what are the odds of that in Holland?) couldn't steal the magic from the famed Keukenhof Gardens, and outside the renowned Rijksmuseum was a spectacular tulip bed.  I'm now dealing with one side effect of that trip - I went a bit overboard ordering bulbs on our return and because our garage is a bit warmer than outside I now have many pots of bulbs which are far ahead of the schedule set by those in the new garden beds I was ordering for.  Nice problem to have.  But as much as I can go crazy with existing varieties of tulips, I'd love to see even more varieties.  Indeed, I have some very specific ideas for engineering tulips that I would find irresistible.

One of several hundred shots I have of bulb beds at Keukenhof

Keukenhof ornamental windmill with a field of tulips in foreground, seen from the electric "whisper boat"

One of dozens of shots I have of the beds by the Rijksmuseum

icon16: Precise Amplification for All!

I've loved the n6tec icon96 instrument since they first tipped me about it several years back.  The idea of running 96 independent PCRs in parallel was just too attractive; the instrument I'd always dreamed of. I never take payments from companies I write about, but probably could make a reasonable claim on commissions for a few icon96 units - I have a hard time not going into total fanboy mode.  But not everybody works in batches that are multiples of 96 - and now at ABRF n6 has launched an affordable option, the $29.5K icon16, to enable nearly any lab to access this technology.

Who's Going to Buy Roche Axelios?

After Roche's AGBT presentation, a key question for many is "who is going to buy an Axelios?".  Below are some thoughts on the topic, based around general classes of sequencing labs that exist in the world.

LinkedIn Laments 1 of N: Where's the API?

In my current role I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. A core task is to identify possible customers, and LinkedIn is rich hunting ground. I'm still sending each reach-out message individually (though admittedly often by pasting a message copied from a growing bank of crafted pitches), so even if I wasn't morally opposed to broad spamming I don't have the bandwidth for it. LinkedIn offers many ways for possible customers to reveal their interests - there's one's profile, any posts you make, comments on other posts, and what you hit like on.  Indeed, those last two can be particularly valuable as LinkedIn has some constraints on search results based on my localization within the broad LinkedIn connection graph, comments plus likes are categories which can leap me away from my parochial bounds.  Because I use LinkedIn so much, I of course have opinions about what I perceive as shortcomings, which I will periodically impose on the readers of this space. And today's is my frustration and degree of bewilderment that LinkedIn lacks an API.

ElysION Fields

Even before new CEO Francis Van Parys took the reins at Oxford Nanopore with the start of the month, the company had made yet another priming to the instrument lineup. The sample-to-answer ElysION has been sent to its eternal rest, presumably in the nicer part of Hades

Image courtesy of Rasmus Kirkegaard

Roche Axelios1 Run Pricing: Not A Knockout - Yet?

By far the most awaited news at AGBT was Roche's reveal of the pricing scheme for Axelios 1 consumables: what would be the structure and how much would different runs cost?  Indeed, Roche sequencing systems chief Mitu Chaudhary walked on to "The Final Countdown".  Roche did show its hand here, but stayed coy on the launch schedule beyond "Summer 2026".  Roche's pricing scheme clarified many questions, but also raised new ones.

Complete Genomics Sale: Gruyère or Emmental?

A bit of interesting news during AGBT was the announcement of the sale of Complete Genomics to Swiss Rockets, a Basel-based company which had last October licensed rights to Complete Genomic's CoolMPS technology for markets except Asia-Pacific.   This move is clearly designed to try to extract Complete Genomics from being banned in the future in US markets due to its perceived ties, in the minds of US lawmakers and politicians, to the government of China.  Swiss Rockets would acquire full rights to the CoolMPS technology in most markets and importantly the key personnel of Complete Genomics such as founder Rade Drmanac.  Complete Genomics will remain the branding for Swiss Rockets' genomics business.  So the question arises, will this be a deal which fixes Complete's issues in a manner as solid as a nice hunk of Gruyère, or will it be as full of holes as a delicious wedge of Emmental?

Ultima Genomics Solaris 2.0: Greater Version, Smaller Beads, Lose A Box

Ultima Genomics announced the 2.0 version of their Solaris chemistry at AGBT.  Perhaps the biggest splash here is that Solaris 2.0 relies on an isothermal amplification chemistry operating on smaller beads, making a path to higher numbers of reads per wafer and eliminating the separate (and very large) emulsion PCR instrument.  

Element Previews High-Throughput VITARI

On the Thursday before AGBT, Element Biosciences unveiled their VITARI high throughput sequencer, expected to ship in the second half of this year.  VITARI surprised much of the sequencing community, including this pundit, as it seemed as though Element was devoting their development efforts to their AVITI24 multi-omic spatial system - which they continue to evolve.

Illumina Constellation Becomes TruPath Genome

Illumina is rebranding their Constellation mapped read technology to TruPath Genome and launching it into the marketplace. Priced at $395 per genome, TruPath Genome was presented as being superior to true long read approaches for generating haplotype blocks and for resolving difficult genetic disease loci.  TruPath Genome relies on on-flowcell tagmentation of long input molecules, meaning that library prep moves entirely to the flowcell.  TruPath genome runs on new NovaSeq X C8 flowcells (8 lanes) or the new C2 flowcell (2 lanes), with one sample per lane.

Canal Biosciences: Ligation Libraries without Distortions from End Repair

Canal Biosciences is a small startup in the library prep space that is making a debut at AGBT this year as a contributing sponsor.  Based in the historic mill town of Lowell Massachusetts with its many canals, the company is bringing forward a ligation chemistry which is free from end repair - and that offers many interesting advantages.  Three of Canal's scientists (half the team!) chatted with me on the eve of AGBT about their TrueLink chemistry.

Enzymatic ligation lies at the heart of a large number of NGS library preparation protocols.  Tagmentation is probably the next most common, and then there is a long tail of niche methods that introduce sequencing adaptors by random priming, click chemistry or other chemistry.  Ligation traces back to the earliest days of molecular cloning.  At first such techniques relied on the sticky overhangs generated by Type II restriction enzymes, but later methods were developed for blunt ends. DNA sheared by mechanical or non-specific nucleases can have a variety of ends, so "end polishing" or "end repair" protocols were developed, taking advantage of the properties of T4 DNA polymerase.  Under the right conditions, this enzyme will extend a recessed 3' hydroxyl and trim back a 3' overhang.  Later came A-tailing and Y-adaptors to ensure directional generation of sequencing library fragments - no i5-i5 or i3-i3 fragments (to use Illumina nomenclature) which will soon drop out during PCR or just waste flowcell space in a PCR-free protocol.

End repair into ligation (with possibly a stop at A-tailing) has served the sequencing community well for decades, so don't fix what isn't broken, right?  Except there are issues becoming increasingly apparent with this approach, especially as DNA sequencing moves beyond genome assembly, transcriptome discovery and variant calling into epigenomic markings and naturally fragmented DNA.  Plus the sequencing instruments deliver increasingly accurate reading of the library fragments they are given, so it is important to not alter the sequence from its native state.

Those cracks have been showing.  First, there are fields using DNA that is extracted as fragments - ancient DNA, forensic DNA and cell-free DNA.  Many of these are short to start with, so discarding any of it via trimming 3' overhangs is painful.  Worse, there is an emerging field of fragmentomics which has shown that the lengths and termini of cell-free DNA carry critical information about the processes that generated the cell-free DNA.  

T4 DNA polymerase also lacks the fidelity of many polymerases, and so potentially generates base substitutions.  Element Biosciences dealt with this in their Q50 protocol by running dark cycles across the bases most often filled in by T4, which they showed had lower accuracy.  But the Broad has published data showing that end repair often rewrites DNA far from the ends of the molecule, with all the problems of rewriting the native DNA.  And if you are interested in methylation marks, rewriting will erase them and the bases filled-in won't have the marks of the opposite strand copied over.

One solution to this is to denature the sample and use a single stranded DNA prep, such as marketed by Claret Biosciences.  Canal is avoiding that step by creating a double stranded ligation chemistry which can still ligate to recessed 3' ends, recessed 5' ends or blunt ends. It also functions on single stranded DNA.   The company is a cagey about the exact chemistry - tiny startups must be careful not to give fast follower competitors more information than strictly necessary - it uses to accomplish this, but their issued patents discuss using mutant ligases and modified oligonucleotides.  One gets the impression that co-founder Yu Zheng, a veteran protein engineer with stops at IDT and NEB and a previous founder of a protein engineering startup - probably regularly dreams of atoms dancing the complex molecular choreography of a ligation reaction.  

Canal's first TrueLink product is a PCR-indexed DNA kit, with 24 reactions for $1.2K and 96 for $4.35K.  This is a bit of a premium to existing ligation kits, but you are getting a superior chemistry which won't trim ends or erase methylation.  Soon to follow - making and validating all the indexing oligos isn't a small task - will be TruLink Absolute PCR-Free. These are intended to take in DNA either from cell-free inputs or downstream of mechanical shearing; commercial nuclease fragmentation kits typically contain end repair enzymes.  Canal plans to offer their own nuclease mix in the future to enable enzymatic shearing

Canal's libraries nearly eliminate the higher error rates seen at the ends of reads.  Interestingly, on Illumina platforms the first few bases still show a highly elevated rate.  Canal hasn't tested this on another platform - I'd suggest Element or PacBio HiFi would be very interesting.  Is it just a basecalling algorithm weakness?

An interesting additional benefit of TrueLink is reducing the number of chimaeras - despite all the Y-adapter trickery ligation libraries contain as much as 1% chimaeric fragments.  Those are certainly unwelcome when trying to detect structural variants, particularly in low coverage data.  

Canal has plenty more in development - kits tuned for RNA-Seq (targeted for next year) and for methylation sequencing.  The latter would support both cytosine-conversion chemistries and 5mC conversion chemistries.  

So expect even more from this small company that wants to steer sequencing library preparation away from the time tested, but problematic, paradigm of end repair followed by A-tailing.

Wish: Scientific Poster Snap Organizer App

AGBT is another conference with a wonderful wealth of scientific posters and never enough time to view them all properly. I definitely enjoy engaging scientists - particularly early stage scientists such as graduate students - at their posters, but poster session times are traps for other conversations and all too often are booked-over with meetings.  And I'm not adept at time management.  Just a bit over a week ago, I found myself furiously running through the posters at SLAS on the last day, trying to capture them on my phone while lamenting the ones I already saw being carted away.  So now I've converted the problem of spending time on each poster to a future time - but can I have more than just a collection of photos on my devices?

AI Agent -Driven Biochemical Optimization

When I started this space, I vowed not to become just a mouthpiece of my employer - but when my employer does something interesting, of course I'm not going to reflexively avoid writing about it.  On the autonomous labs front, there's an interesting preprint showing how an intelligent agent interacting with an autonomous laboratory system can generate new knowledge. I'd like to think I would have covered it anyways, but since it is the autonomous laboratory at my workplace, I'm especially eager to do so.  In a collaboration between Ginkgo and OpenAI, an agent was used to optimize a cell-free protein synthesis reaction using our autonomous laboratory based on Reconfigurable Automation Cart (RAC) technology.  This isn't the first time this has been done, but I think it has a number of interesting elements. Plus, optimizing complex biochemical reactions is a broadly interesting area to explore.  And, thinking up new services running on our autonomous laboratory is exactly my bailiwick, and I certainly reserve the right to use this space to be a mouthpiece of myself!

AGBT 2026 Preview

AGBT starts on Monday at the Signia by Hilton Bonnet Creek in Orlando on Monday, but the pre-conference flurry of announcements is already rolling out.  Here is a quick scan of what's already been telegraphed to be in store next week - and expect more announcements over the next few days.  I'm getting to Orlando on Friday - far before most people so perhaps I can actually focus on writing (though I also have a backlog of follow-ups from last week's SLAS lab automation conference).   I've supplied links for many of these items, though in some cases it isn't easy to find a single link to include

Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma Mutation Trajectories at Single Cell Resolution

Single cell RNA sequencing is nearly ubiquitous; single cell DNA sequencing has been much rarer.  I'm going to dive in a bit - but not a full review - of a recent paper which described single cell DNA sequencing of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas.  The paper applied the Mission Bio droplet-based PCR approach, which hasn't had quite the buzz of its close technological cousin 10X Genomics.  And there are some interesting implications of the findings in this paper to impending developments in oncology therapeutics - including one in which I have more than academic interest.

Non-coding DNA's Alpha Moment

I had been meaning to read the AlphaGenome paper on non-coding variant effect prediction from Google DeepMind which recently showed up in Nature, but had found excuses not to dive in.  Then DeciBio’s Stephane Budel posted on LinkedIn with some incisive comments and few things spur me to action better than my sense of competition! So here's a quick, incomplete & imperfect take on this giant paper.

Sequencer vs. Library Prep Market Structures

Something I started pondering as I was prepping my JP Morgan items: the structure of the market for sequencing library prep is very different from that for sequencers.  Perhaps this is painfully obvious to many, but I hadn't turned it over before in my mind.   It also follows that the sequencer market was overweighted in who was invited to give talks at the banking conference - nearly every sequencer maker was there - Complete Genomics and Singular Genomics were the missing parties (and Singular is a bit of a quasi-sequencer company now).  Note that in this piece I will not claim a complete census of companies in this space - though please feel free to note exceptions in the comments

P2 Solo: ONT Extends Support But Not Sales

A brief update to the earlier P2 Solo piece - Oxford Nanopore has now announced they will extend their support for the device until 2030, but they are still ending sales this summer.  So a cosmetic victory for Solo fans, but not really much gain - and certainly disappointing for anyone saving their quid for a future purchase.  Solos may become very valuable, though it's hard to see ONT ever countenancing a healthy resale market.

ONT Axes P2 Solo, Roiling Community

Oxford Nanopore has a serious case of user community unrest, triggered by the announcement that the P2 Solo (aka P2s) will be phased out starting this summer.  P2 Solo is the two flowcell version of PromethION which required external GPU for basecalling; P2i is the sibling with onboard GPU. P2 Solo clearly has a very passionate constituency, one which feels betrayed by its discontinuation.  This ongoing episode - ONT could always change their mind and restore the P2 Solo - is a cautionary tale of the challenges of changing corporate strategy in the context of a brand which has built a near cult-like loyalty. 

JP Morgan 2026 Roundup

The J.P. Morgan conference last week was mostly small tidbits of info on the sequencing front, with Element delivering the one big teaser announcement. 

JPM 2026 Schedule Through A Molecular Tools & Testing Lens

The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is this week in San Francisco.  As with every other one, I'm tracking any news remotely from Boston.  Some year I really should go to observe the sheer spectacle of it, but this isn't the year - and if I were in California now it probably would be more valuable to attend Plant & Animal Genomes down in San Diego.  If you do go, be sure to check out the 4 instrument autonomous laboratory Ginkgo will have running in the Marriott Marquis lobby.  But here are some notes to keep track of when different companies are presenting.  Public companies will make their presentations available shortly thereafter to comply with insider trading regulations.  Unfortunately, several years ago J.P. Morgan ended posting presentations from private companies - these companies could choose to post their decks but I'm not optimistic to see many.

Stalking the Elusive Product Market Fit

I had a wonderful breakfast conversation back in November with Arima Genomics Founder (and now President and Chief Operating Officer) Sid Selvaraj where he brought up the topic of product market fit.  I've often kibitzed on 'omics companies trials and tribulations trying to achieve product market fit, but now that I'm in an outward-facing product development role the concept is central to my daily work.  What is it and how does one achieve it - or fail to?

Scales of Instrumentation and Automation

Back in September I moved into a product role within the automation unit at Ginkgo, where we sell autonomous laboratories.  I'm going to end up posting a bunch on the topic, as I spend a lot of time thinking about it and this is an interesting place to expose my thinking to critique.  It's also a way to solicit feedback on semi-formed ideas.  I referenced autonomous laboratories in my previous post, which might have some wondering "what exactly is an autonomous laboratory?"  So this post will lay out a description of different levels of automation (or instrumentation) so I can refer back to it in future posts - and there will certainly be further posts focused on these different scales of automation. So here I will lay out four levels of laboratory instrumentation: Bench, Walkup, Workcell and Autonomous.  BTW, if you are in San Francisco next week during J.P. Morgan,  there will be a small autonomous lab running in the Marriott Marquis lobby - and it can be viewed regardless of whether you are registered for the conference

Sequencing Instrument Outlook 2026