Complete Genomics and the Whole Genome Sequencing market 3

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – Sequencing by Ligation 2

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – Sequencing by Reversible Terminators

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – Sequencing by Pyrophosphate Release

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – Template Preparation 1

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – Library Preparation 1

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 […]

Next Generation Sequencing – A Few Fundamental Concepts 2

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 […]

Next-Generation Sequencing – its historical context

Even though the history of next-generation sequencing is short (the 454 GS20 came out in 2005, the Solexa 1G in 2007, and the SOLiD 2 in 2008), there is a robust genomic revolution going on, and a fierce battle in the marketplace with plummeting costs and soaring throughput. Whether Moore’s […]

Digital PCR – a research market poised to grow 4

Life in the next-generation world moves quickly. And I’m talking not about next-generation sequencing, but something termed ‘next-generation PCR’ by internal folks at Life Technology, and can be described as ‘third-generation PCR’ if one thinks about the Polymerase Chain Reaction in terms of measurement.

How will the public learn about genomics and Next Generation Sequencing?

We’re on the verge of a new era in education. This week, the Smithsonian Museum announced a new genomics exhibit at the National History Museum, in conjunction with the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), and generous grants from several companies and institutions, including a major contribution from Life Technologies […]

The whole-exome vs. whole-genome sequencing debate

An enterprising salesperson from Complete Genomics used this newfangled social media thing called LinkedIn to make her mark on the world (perhaps) by posing a discussion question. (It was over at the ‘Genome Interpretation‘ group in case you were wondering.) Entitled, “The last days of exome sequencing“, she posed the […]

The future of commerce is mobile 1

This past week a statistic was released that indicated that over 50% of all cellphone usage in the US were smartphones. In addition to that, about 9% of all web traffic is now from mobile devices, yet according to one survey of 7,000 websites, only 4.8% of them were mobile-ready […]