In contrast to BioNano Genomics, who is starting commercialization with early access customers now and full commercial launch in the Spring of 2013, OpGen launched the Argus™ Optical Mapping system in the summer of 2010. Their customers use this system for microbial strain mapping, mainly for infectious disease research or finishing reference bacterial strains.
ASHG 2012 in San Francisco is finally over! The exhibit booths get torn down, the equipment gets packed up and shipped to storage, and hundreds of foot-weary front-line soldiers get back to their normal routines, whether in sales, marketing, product development, R&D or product management.
Here at ASHG 2012 in San Francisco this week, a ton of activity around the exhibitors, and Life Technologies does not disappoint with the Ion Bus on the show floor, an open 20 foot x 30 foot booth, a new digital PCR instrument (the QuantStudio 3D) introduced, two luncheon workshops, an Ion Torrent User Group meeting, a special SF Museum of Modern Art event on one evening, and an Ion Lounge evening event on the other. (These last two events were described internally as ‘networking only’, which is a code-word for a great social event.)
This past week I attended the Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s “Applying Next Generation Sequencing” meeting in Providence R.I. Attendance was down which is an indicator of the maturity of NGS technology, constrained travel budgets, or an oversupply of NGS conferences, and probably a combination of all three.
A few weeks ago this paper appeared in Nature Biotechnology, “Genome mapping on nanochannel arrays for structural variation analysis and sequence assembly”. It was the first publication of a startup company in San Diego called BioNano Genomics.
In previous posts I covered the basics of next-generation sequencing – library preparation, template preparation, and the sequencing methodology itself, whether by pyrophosphate detection, single base extension with reversible terminators, or probe addition by ligation. And single molecule sequencing’s attractiveness as a technology has been covered here, but here I’ll detail how the startup Pacific Biosciences does it’s magic. (For some additional commentary on the company and its prospects check here.)
Oxford Nanopore, based in Oxford U.K., made a remarkable announcement that surprised many in February’s AGBT meeting in Marco Island. A GridION and MiniION single-molecule sequencers were announced, promising 15 minute runtimes, no sample preparation, and a disposable USB-stick sequencer for $900 (in the case of the MiniION), with 50kb long readlengths (and 100kb promised) at only a 4% error rate it appears to be a dream come true for many research challenges that await.