30 September 2011

What's the NGS Buzz?

There's been quite a bit of 'next-gen' sequencing news lately (some of it positive, some of it pretty negative). I thought I'd take a stab at ranking them in terms of their "buzz" - how much people are talking about them, excitement around updates, etc. It is very subjective and definitely NOT an attempt at ranking their usefulness/performance (which would be highly application specific). Feel free to let me know how wrong I am in the comments section.

(I inexplicably left out Complete Genomics - now corrected)


 
Platform Comments Buzz Factor Trend
Ion Torrent Lots of promises, excitement and chatter
Lots of blogs analyzing data
10
MiSeq Data starting to trickle out
Mostly in a battle with Ion Torrent
6
GnuBio Completely backed off their "$30 WGS" claims
Interest picking back up now that they're in beta testing
5
Complete Genomics Still in the news, in a death battle with ILMN and BGI 5
HiSeq Dominant (if boring) NGS workhorse 4
Oxford Nanopore Not much news
Initial excitement waning
Waiting for next (first?) big announcement
3
Pacific Biosciences Only news is bad news
Management overestimated market adoption of PacBio
Laid off 28% of workforce (ouch!)
3
SOLiD Has become the ugly stepsister of Ion Torrent
Management says "putting all chips into Ion Torrent" and "(light based seq) is nearing the end"
2
454 Not a lot of news since FLX+
Not much in the way of public discussion
2



7 comments:

  1. How long til we hear more about IBM and the Roche/DNAe collaboration I wonder?

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  2. Good question, Gavin. I don't have any details, but I suspect it may be a while. The promise of nanopore sequencing has been 'just around the corner' for years now. Here's hoping we see something soon!

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  3. I believe ONT will have release the Gridion on early access this year. That's what they told me - and they said it wasn't a secret so hopefully my comment is kosher :)

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  4. Well, now that you've posted it here, literally 10s of people will see it. I sure hope you don't get in trouble ;-) Seriously, I'm quite excited about the potential of ONP - can't wait to see it. Do you know if it will be strand sequencing or exonuclease sequencing that will be in early access this year?

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  5. Pretty certain it'll be the exonuclease approach as it's their own technology, the one Illumina are invested in, and the more mature of the two. Strand sequencing is the product of the UCSC collaboration and was only published recently. Excited about it all myself - I have high hopes.

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  6. Pretty good arrow pointing for three months ago. You need to update this every month and add all the instruments that are missing and maybe add a second column with another graphic maybe including a tombstone. If you also added an anonymous way for commenters to add in their two cents but then that would just invite marketing to astroturf.

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  7. Thanks, Paul. It's my intention to update it every once in a while. Monthly may be a little too frequent - I was thinking of once a quarter (Hmm, looks like even by that criterion I'm due - maybe I'll have a look at it over the break).

    There's lots of other 'in development' systems that could be added (Genia, NobleGen, Stratos, NABsys, LaserGen, IBS, Halcyon, ZS Genetics, Lightspeed, IBM/Roche, Electron Optica, others?). However, there's so little info about them that they're kind of hard to rate. Are there some systems that you think should definitely be on there?

    Not sure how to add anonymous comments to the table, but people are free to post down here. I even let the crackpot ones through ;-)

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