AGBT 2023 Is Nearly Upon Us!
AGBT is less than a week away in Hollywood Florida - and I've been letting everything else get ahead of writing anything here.   The JP Morgan Conference at the beginning of this month didn't have major fireworks from the sequencing vendors, but did have some news.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - January 31, 2023 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

PacBio Revio: Same Footprint, 80% The Time, 15X The HiFi!
PacBio has been rolling out announcements around the ASHG meeting and now delivers a huge one: the next generation SMRT instrument “Revio” will roll out next spring and it’s a big step up in throughput. With Revio’s 15X boost in per-run throughput over Sequel IIe, PacBio is touting this as 30X HIFi genomes for under $1K sequencing consumables per genome. Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 25, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Better Than FizzBuzz: First Bioinformatics Problem in an Erratic Series of Indeterminant Length
Periodically in my work or during writing this blog I come across computational problems that have the aspects of making, at least in my mind, very good teaching problems.   Some of the characteristics are that the basic problem is relatively simple to explain, the skills required are reusable on other problems, the concepts are germane to other problems and that the posed problem can be expanded in steps to something much richer.  Such problems might even be the nu cleus of undergraduate or even high school bioinformatics projects, though with the recent news of a high schooler sequencing his dead pet angelfish's ge...
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 19, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

General Inception Aims to Ignite New Company Formation
A week ago, a company calling itself General Inception emerged from stealth as a new concept, which they call an “Igniter company”, to promote the formation of new life sciences company.  As described to me in a phone conversation with General Inception CEO Paul Conley, General Inception provides a range of science and business expertise and support to enable embryonic ideas to condense into functional st artups.  The igniter metaphor Conley offered me is the spark plug of a car: it is required to start the engine and continues to provide a key part of the functioning whole.   Conley extended this to say that Gener...
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 6, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

What Conversation Does Each Sequencing Instrument Vendor Wish You To Have?
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Source: Omics! Omics! - October 5, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Illumina Roadmap Part 2: Infinity Becomes Illumina Complete Long Reads
The Only Thing Clear About Infinity Is It Is Now Complete Long Reads.  Illumina told us a new name for Infinity -- Illumina Complete Long Reads -- and an initial pair of products, but didn't reveal anything new about the underlying tech.   They threw out a number of claims, but very vague ones.  Particularly confusing is that it"isn't synthetic reads".   If not, then what is it?  Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 3, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Illumina Roadmap Part 1: NovaSeq Xplus & XLEAP-SBS Chemistry
Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - October 2, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Notes From Coffee With MGI
A couple of weeks ago   I sat down for coffee with a pair of MGI representatives - American Region CEO Yongwei Zhang and Director, Global Business Development Damon Zhang. Since I hadn’t been at AGBT 2022 (my 2023 application already filed!). Yongwei and I had planned to try to catch up the next time he was in Boston area, so I braved our current subway issues (not one, but two major lines shut for extended maintenance!) and covered a range of topics.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - September 21, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

SRA Entries Should Not Ever Disappear Into Thin Air
I ran into an annoying problem last night and was quite steamed, but had the discipline to wait until morning to vent publicly about it.   Now I'm more in a morose mood on the subject, not furious but still quite frustrated. The quick version of what happened is I'm belatedly trying to go through some nicely documented reproducible analysis code to explore some concerns I have with the analysis, and the code is working on an SRA entry -- and that SRA entry is the entire point of the analysis. And that SRA entry which I know once existed now doesn't - other than this code and the preprint to go with it, it'...
Source: Omics! Omics! - August 23, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Supply Stall Slows Singular
Singular Genomics reported earnings last week and delivered an unpleasant surprise: inability of suppliers to make timely deliveries of key (but unspecified) hardware components have slowed G4 instrument production to a very slow crawl.   Given the lively competition in the desktop short read space, this is a serious setback for Singular's commercial launch.   Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - August 16, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

AGBT 2022: Overhanging Questions
AGBT broke up a couple of weeks ago and I've failed to write anything here so far.   It was frustrating not attending, but not registering for a meeting in February seemed prudent given the pattern of COVID waves - I hadn't considered (nor would have wanted to bank on) AGBT organizers reacting so well and rescheduling the meeting.   It sounds like a number of attendees did catch the virus at the meeting -- though I'm presumably still quite protected by my infection a month earlier.   Anyways, I'm going to organize this around one to two questions that hover in my head for the different sequencing provide...
Source: Omics! Omics! - June 23, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Admin: Feedburner to Follow.it Switch
A bit over a year ago Google made one of their dreaded announcements that they would be slowly killing off one of their acquisitions, in this case FeedBurner.   Well over a thousand of you have been using FeedBurner to follow me via email.  Follow.it has a wonderful free plan that can take over all of the previous functionality and I could just import the old subscription listRead more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - June 8, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Ultima Genomics Storms Out Of Stealth Promising $1/Gigabase Short Reads
To date, the new entrants targeting Illumina ’s short read business have been aiming at the middle of Illumina’s range, trying to take on NextSeq. Element Biosciences is touting high accuracy for a low price.   Omniome (now PacBio) alsohas positioned itself to tout accuracy.   Singular Genomics is claiming to enable great flexibility and fast runs.  But all aimed at NextSeq.  As part of the run up to AGBT another company is decloaking from stealth mode: Ultima Genomics, however they are going not after NextSeq but full throttle after Illumina’s pinnacle, the NovaSe q running the S4 flowcell.  The value proposit...
Source: Omics! Omics! - May 31, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

London Calling 2022: Peptide Sequencing
London Calling was last week and Clive Brown's big revelation was a peek at Oxford Nanopore's progress on enabling peptide sequencing on the platform.   Peptide sequencing and identification is a hot area right now, with multiple startups looking to provide alternatives to mass spectrometry approaches.  Clive stressed that the technology is very early in development.  It's definitely a clever fork of the existing DNA sequencing technology.   However, it also illustrates a significant organizational challenge which Oxford. So I'm going to spend a post focused on this while I figure out how to slice up th...
Source: Omics! Omics! - May 23, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs

Nanopore Knights' Notes
Clive Brown gave a"mezzanine" update on Oxford Nanopore just over two weeks ago titled"The Knights Who Say Me".   Clive reiterated a lot of prior guidance but did make a few announcements that are relevant to the ongoing history of the Oxford Nanopore platform - and blessedly, he omitted for time's sake a deep coverage of that history or the usual Nanopore 101 tutorial.     In particular, two long-time components of the platform are now headed for the exits.Read more » (Source: Omics! Omics!)
Source: Omics! Omics! - April 15, 2022 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Keith Robison Source Type: blogs