A Few Things Before Nanopore Community Meeting Begins
Nanopore Community Meeting begins within the hour. San Francisco is spectacular as ever -- Alcatraz Island disappearing into the fog as I fiddled with camera settings, the spectacular Bay Bridge spans are visible from the the breakfast area and I even got to see some notable locals on my walk over from the hotelIf this crowd doesn ’t get a move on, they’re going to miss#nanoporeconf breakfastpic.twitter.com/rFwfGdQTit— Keith Robison (@OmicsOmicsBlog)November 28, 2018Hans Jansen was kind enough to remind me by tweet of a couple of missed topics inmy preview piece. So let's cover them!.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 28, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Nanopore Community Meeting 2018 Preview
Okay, now that I'mdone venting -- for now -- about ONT's customer service experience (well, almost done -- they sent me the same damn letter they sent my colleague -- why were they several hours apart???) -- let's move on to the Nanopore Community Meeting. Technically it started today with the training session, but I'm not heading out until tonight. At the first one of these in NYC Oxford tried to avoid making any announcements, but they seem to now like having two major focus times a year sometimes supplemented with Clive Brown webinars in between. Here are someRead more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 27, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
How Not Do Think Like A Customer: Examples from ONT and AMZN
I'd planned today to use some downtime to write up a preview of the Nanopore Community Meeting which I am attending tomorrow and Thursday. I might still do that, but the same organization just engaged in the sort of customer engagement that drives me batty (yeah, twisting the lion's tail before entering their den -- smart move or what?) and it reminded me of another lousy experience I had recently with avery prominent company: Amazon.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 27, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Failure: The Real Secret Sauce of Engineering
I tookone swing at Vijay Pande's overly rosypiece on applying engineering methods to biology and medicine and similar minded efforts were published byAsh Jogalekar at Curious Wavefunction andDerek Lowe at In The Pipeline. Perhaps I shouldn't make another go, but it is a new excuse to explore an old fascination of mine. Pande's subhead was"Billion-dollar bridges rarely fail -- whereas billion-dollar drug failures are routine". I can't argue that. Actually, it would seem from an informal search that billion dollar bridges are actually much rarer than billion dollar drug development program...
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 15, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
No, the Groves Fallacy Can't be Retired Yet
Vijay Pande hasa thought-provoking piece in Scientific American on the Groves Fallacy, though in the end I'm afraid mostly what he provokes in me is the thought that he's in most cases pretty far off base. Titled"How to Engineer Biology", he claims that the Grove Fallacy -- the idea that biology can't be tamed by engineering -- is quickly being put to rest. And Pande isn't some naive Silicon Valley type, but a professor at Stanford whose lab works in experimental biology. So he has some street cred -- but that doesn't mean he isn't mostly wrong.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 8, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Illumina Buys PacBio: More Thoughts
Illumina surprised pretty much everyone in the genomics community by announcing the purchase of Pacific Biosciences. I had spent Thursday deep in the weeds of a combined PacBio-ONT-Illumina dataset, so was caught completely by surprise on my commute home by an email asking for my comment. If you do want to hear hot takes on it from myself and AllSeq's Shawn Baker, Theral Timpson over atMendelspod interviewed us that night. There has of course been much discussion of the deal and tributes. I've had the weekend to ponder things, and here are some somewhat better thought out and detailed comments -- though...
Source: Omics! Omics! - November 5, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
You Can Be Impatient Running MInIONs, But Not Feeding Them
Yes, it's been way too long since I wrote here. Even longer since I did so with any regularity. There was always some list of things draining my time and energy. But I resolved this week to get back on the horse -- and that was even before today's bit ofdilithium news. In particular, in one twenty-four hour span three different people remarked on the prolonged hiatus -- a professional contact, a commenter on the blog and finally somevery cutting remarks from Draco (aka TNG). And what better way to get going again but to kvetch about Oxford Nanopore's supply chain model?Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 16, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Two Museums Guaranteed to Fluor You
I've been horribly neglecting this space for an extended period. Contributors to that include a TNG eclosing from high school, ferrying grandparents, a milestone (or is it millstone?) birthday and a 10 day vacation with poor Internet service. Oh yeah, another one of those starts Thursday. Then there's keeping the genome factory going -- at times I feel like a worker in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. But someone even noticed and emailed me today whether this hiatus would end, which is beyond reason enough to get going. But tonight's entry has nothing really to do with biology or genomics, but rather he...
Source: Omics! Omics! - July 31, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
LC2018: VolTRAX
In mypreview ahead of London Calling, I suggested that VolTRAX is a device that still hasn't found its raison d'etre. With the meeting, the device officially pre-launched and the company is now taking pre-orders for delivery in the Fall. And it still feels like a device which hasn't yet found its purpose, though Clive Brown presented a dazzling (if perhaps distant) vision of where VolTRAX might go.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - June 18, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
LC2018: Flongle, Ubik-a-something and Metricoin
London Calling has been over for nearly three weeks. I originally wanted to write up at least something after the first night, but fatigue overcame me and I didn't get anything useful put together. And then travel and more fatigue set in. But beyond that and the usual temptation to procrastinate, there is the challenge of forming a coherent narrative from all the different threads at the meeting. There's all the Oxford Nanopore official announcements and then various user presentation tidbits. After several failed mental attempts to compose a big picture take on everything, I've decided to try to w...
Source: Omics! Omics! - June 13, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Miscellaneous & Disorderly Thoughts on the Eve of London Calling
It's the night before London Calling. I hope to post Thursday, but an after-meeting report won ’t be until nest week - I must dash on Friday fir a slightly insane/exhilarating routing to meet my family in Florida for the holiday weekend. Exhilarating as I will have a layover in one of the ancient capitals of Europe, Lisbon, which I’ve never visited. Insane, because it’s a 12 hour overni ght layover. Anyway, between the challenge of covering Oxford Nanopore's expanding reach of products and applications and being sleep-addled from taking the redeye flight I'm going to throw out a bunch of thoughts without ...
Source: Omics! Omics! - May 23, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
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 ...
Source: Omics! Omics! - May 22, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
PromethION Racing: A Call To The Post
I was at a get-together yesterday for bioinformatics folks associated with Third Rock Ventures companies at a local pub. The organizer, who I've known for a number of years, was introducing me with the pleasant"Keith writes a nice blog" -- but then the barb"but he hasn't posted in a while".Ouch! But it hurts because it's true; too many excuses to not write and far too many half-baked ideas and interviews that should be out (or worse, a nearly complete post). Since it is May, which in the U.S. is bookended by iconic racing events, I'd like to trot out an idea that has been idling f...
Source: Omics! Omics! - May 3, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
Mission Bio Launches Custom Panels
Back in OctoberI covered the launch ofMission Bio's single cell platform, Tapestri. Tapestri is a microfluidic platform which encapsulates cells and sets of barcoded primers into droplets, lyses the cells within the droplets and executes PCR on the released DNA. Mission initially targeted hematologic cells, since they do not require disaggregation, and offered a standard panel of primes. Around the time of AGBT, Mission launched a custom panel option and took the time to sit down with me. Now with AACR, Mission has announced placing Tapestri at multiple major cancer centers: the NCI, Mt. Sinai, MD Anderson, Me...
Source: Omics! Omics! - April 16, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
A Small Rampage Over STAT's Movie Piece
A movie opened this weekend which, by all prior evidence and new reviews, is unbelievably silly but destined to rake in the bucks. Rampage is very loosely - as if it could be another way - based on avideo arcade game. The original game ’s backstory had a mysterious ray transforming people into monsters, but the movie has changed that to CRISPR. So STAT had a piece which, to my great disappointment, gave the movie ’s science a near pass in a piece featuring two writers chatting . . (Note: this post has mild spoilers, though if you've seen the trailers they give almost all of this away).Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - April 14, 2018 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs
