Jan 25 2009
I have to confess, I am a great fan of both red wine and TED talks!! Therefore, I was thrilled to discover this talk on An Introduction to Genomics that boosted both the words genomics AND wine in the advertising text. The talk is given by Barry Schuler - board member of Synthetic Genomics - who attacks the subject with a great deal of enthusiasm and salesmanship.
Jan 15 2009
The other day I wrote about Oxford Nanopore and their new collaboration with Illumina. The nanopore sequencing technology is truly fascinating with its flurophore-free approach. Thanks to the Aminopop blog I picked up this cool animation of the technology that Oxford Nanopore has produced - enjoy!
Jan 12 2009
Today, a press release announced a today announced a strategic alliance including a commercialization agreement and equity investment. Illumina will market, sell, distribute, and service BASE™ Technology products developed by Oxford Nanopore for DNA sequencing into the research and diagnostic markets on a worldwide basis.
Given Illuminas position in the market, this is a big leap forward for the commerzialization of nanopore sequencing.
Jan 07 2009
In the new issue of Biotechniques, a paper by Maricic and Pääbo (login may be required) describes how a change to the standard 454 sequencing protocol can dramatically increase the size of the library of DNA that goes into the actual sequencing reaction.
The trick used is to replace the last step in the library preparation where single stranded DNA is released from streptavidin beads. The original 454 protocol employes NaOH denaturation for this step, but the researchers found that this procedure results in a loss of over 99% of the DNA. However, When they replaced the NaOH denaturation with a heat denaturation by incubation recovery increased to 98%.
These authors are coming from the ancient DNA community and have an obvious motivation for optimizing the DNA retrieval from scarce ancient biological material. However, these findings are equally important to other applications aimed at sequencing small volumes of biological material such as tumors and within-host sub-populations of pathogens.
