A few days ago I reviewed in brief the history of Helicos Biosciences (HCLS), a company that held out the promise of single molecule sequencing, but failed to deliver on several fronts to the next-generation sequencing market. (This would include accuracy, throughput per dollar, and ease of use / reliability […]
Recently I was asked what Roche would purchase when they said publicly that they “would not revisit Illumina, and will pursue smaller takeovers”, and I answered there were a few small development companies out there but even fewer with something ready to sell. (Roche isn’t known for development of NGS […]
The next-generation sequencing market continues its downward trajectory – routinely violating Moore’s Law by an estimated 3x, the cost per megabase curve started to significantly bend downward around 2007 when the Solexa 1G started selling in volume, and gave the 454 GS20 (as it was known then) the first competition […]
In every technological revolution, there is a first seminal breakthrough, a burst of commercial activity from many individual companies, and then the eventual maturing of a market, of standards, and the discovery of new uses for the technology in often surprising ways.
Complete Genomics is a startup business founded upon a particular idea – that the whole genome sequencing of human individuals is going to be industrialized, commonplace, and have such clinical utility so as to become the dominant application for next-generation sequencing. (Disclosure – I have no financial interest in this […]
If you’ve been following thus far, we’ve covered sequencing by pyrophosphate detection, sequencing by reversible terminators, and now we have sequencing by ligation. Note that the term ‘sequencing by synthesis’ is not used here (although Illumina likes to use the term and names some of their reagents ‘SBS’ accordingly) as […]
As mentioned previously, there are three main methods of sequencing, the first being the pyrophosphate detection approach, and here is the second (and most popular) approach, using reversible terminators. Given a set of amplified template molecules (remember there are millions to many hundreds of millions of these discrete ‘clusters’ of […]
After preparation of the library (and careful quantitation) and preparation of the amplified template comes the main event: the sequencing itself. While there are several methods available, the methods can be divided into three broad divisions. The three divisions are (firstly) Pyrophosphate Release (named for the original patent by Mostafa […]
After a library is properly prepared, (remember it can be from many sources – randomly sheared genomic DNA, cDNA from a small RNA sample, an immunoprecipitated sample) the library molecules need to be amplified in some manner, before the sequencing takes place. Thus there is a critical need for accurate […]
Looking at sequencing from one perspective, library preparation is straightforward. Sequencing a genome (whether bacterial on the order of 5 million bases or a human at 3 billion bases) is a shotgun-based affair with tens of millions to tens of billions of reads that overlap multiple times across the genome […]
As I mentioned in my prior post, Sanger capillary sequencing is not going away anytime soon. Yet next-generation sequencing has made a huge mark in the world – growing from zero in 2005 to a USD $1 Billion market in 2012. And its growth is estimated by various sources to […]
