Should PentaSaturn Buy An iSeq: A Hypothetical Scenario Illustrating Platform Picking

Editorial note: I wrote this in early January, then planned to slot it in after some other items.   Thenlife knocked me upside the head, then AGBT came along and then it was forgotten.   Once I remember it, I fretted it had gone stale. But I had put a lot of effort into it and really nothing has changed with regard to iSeq, other than it should be shipping now.  Besides, this week is London Calling and so having an Illumina-centric piece could be a bit of useful balance.  So, f or your consideration:Some of the online discussion around this January's iSeq announcement, springingfrom my piece or elsewhere, explores how the iSeq fits into the sequencing landscape.   In particular, how does it fit in with Illumina's existing MiniSeq and MiSeq and how does it go against Oxford Nanopore's MinION.   For example, inMatthew Herper's Forbes piece, genomics maven Elaine Mardis compares iSeq unfavorably to MiSeq in terms of cost-per-basepair.   I'm a huge believer in fitting sequencing to ones scientific and practical realities and not the other way'round: no one platform quite fits all situations nor do even the same metrics fit all situations.   So in this piece, I'm going to illustrate what I believe is a plausible scenario in which iSeq would make sense.   Now, I have designed this to play to iSeq's characteristics and very realistically have many dials which I could turn to go in another direction.   Which I will try to note as I go along.R...
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs