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COST training school: Bioinformatics for microbial community analysis

I will be helping teach one day of this course which is fully-funded if you are a student from a COST-participating country… see below for details: Deadline is next week, so hurry if you are interested. COST training school ES1103: Bioinformatics for microbial community analysis Dates: December 11th- 14th (the school will begin at 1pm [...]

Whole-genome sequencing for MRSA epidemiology: Transmission and “clouds of variation”

Whole-genome sequencing for MRSA epidemiology: Transmission and “clouds of variation”

It’s an unusual sensation to wake up in the morning and hear Moira Stewart on the Radio 2 breakfast show talking about bacterial genomics and whole-genome sequencing. But it wasn’t a lucid dream, the publication of a new paper from Simon Harris and Sharon Peacock (of Cambridge University and the Sanger Centre, respectively) in Lancet [...]

Would you be interested in attending a regular, informal meeting on sequencing and bioinformatics in the Midlands?

Something I’ve wanted to do for ages in the Midlands since being inspired by Scotland’s excellent Nextgenbug series, please register below if you are interested:

Properly awesome: HiSeq 2500 2×151 rapid run streaming to BaseSpace

Properly awesome: HiSeq 2500 2×151 rapid run streaming to BaseSpace

OK, I think this is awesome enough to share with you guys. These are some metagenomics samples being run on a HiSeq 2500 in 2x151bp rapid run mode, with the results being streamed to BaseSpace in real-time. What I love about this is that the various statistics and metrics update in real-time. I spent a [...]

All the cool kids are on arXiv and Haldane’s Sieve .. why you should be too

Something very exciting has happened in recent weeks on arXiv, the preprint server which many biologists believe is the reserve of angry physicists, beardy mathematicians and unwashed computer scientists  (joke!!!). Not any longer. I first felt a disturbance in the force in September when a few high-profile human genomicists started making pledges to send all [...]

Result from the DTU MLST web server

Generating MLST profiles from short-read data

There are now several available options if you want to call MLST profiles from whole-genome data. DTU MLST Server The web server at the Center for Genomic Epidemiology at the Danish Technical University is probably the easiest option, with the advantage that it will accept both raw read files and assemblies. It worked well when [...]

Some thoughts on today’s Ion World announcements

Some thoughts on today’s Ion World announcements

A few significant announcements from Ion World today (sourced from the press release and #ionworld Tweets) which I’ve summarised here: Proton III and Avalanche The Ion Proton is now shipping and Life Tech plan to ship 100 instruments to customers in September. The initial chip, Proton I (“PI”) will do 60-80m reads and “up to 10Gb” of [...]

Sequencing low diversity libraries on Illumina MiSeq

After its launch in 2005, the 454 rapidly became the go-to technology if you wanted to sample diversity in amplicon libraries, whether a cancer panel, a viral quasispecies or microbial community profiling. It is not difficult to see why. Compared to Sanger sequencing the 454 offered massive throughput, being able to produce over a million reads [...]