High-throughput sequencing

Sequencing data: I want the truth! (You can’t handle the truth!)

Sequencing data: I want the truth! (You can’t handle the truth!)

Two sequencing papers caught my eye this week. This letter from Piskol and Li  is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the heavily criticised and debunked (also see: GenomesUnzipped) RNA editing paper from Li and Cheung published in Science in early 2011 (as Thomas Keane said on Twitter: ‘I can’t believe people are still debating this!). The letter Piskol and Li examined [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Map of high-throughput instruments: What can you do with the data?

I’m going to try and get myself in the habit of more frequent, smaller updates. A few people have started using the data from Omicsmaps.com, the world-map of high-throughput sequencing instruments that James Hadfield and I run to power their own projects, which we think is great. For example a service called Findini is scraping [...]

Benchtop Sequencer Comparison paper

In case you haven’t seen our recent paper, you can download the paper here (subscription required): http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2198 Performance comparison of benchtop high-throughput sequencing platforms  Nature Biotechnology advance online publication published online 22 April 2012 Nicholas J Loman, Raju V Misra, Timothy J Dallman, Chrystala Constantinidou, Saheer E Gharbia, John Wain & Mark J Pallen Here is a press [...]