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