PolITiGenomics » PacBio

The Pac’s out of the bag

dd — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:51:09 +0000

Most of you have probably already seen this, but Pacific Biosciences announced the institutions that will be getting their first ten prototype instruments (Bio-IT World, GenomeWeb, MarketWatch). The Genome Center is among the institutions that will be getting one. It looks like PacBio will indeed be the first third generation sequencing company with instruments out in the wild. Don’t get too excited though, it’s probable that these third generation instruments will be a lot like the first batch of second generation instruments: it will take a while before they are ready for production sequencing, reliably producing good quality data. We’ll find out more from all the sequencing instrument companies in the coming days at AGBT.

Sequencing — the past, present, and future

dd — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:49:21 +0000

Science Magazine has a nice article, Sanger Who? Sequencing the Next Generation, describing past sequencing technology, the current “next-generation” sequencing instruments and their capabilities, and several of the companies working to become the next big thing in sequencing. If you are interested in learning, at a high level, how each of the technologies work and how they compare to each other, it is worth a read.

Personal genomics will shape the next decade

dd — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:58:13 +0000

According to Forbes, personal genomics will be one of the five technologies that will shape the next decade. They predict (not too boldly) that personal genome sequencing will become widely available and pave the way to personalized medicine. I wonder where they would get an idea like that? They mention Pacific Biosciences, Knome (George Church), and venture capital darling Complete Genomics as players in this field. They somehow fail to mention privacy concerns or informatics/IT challenges. I guess that’s what you get from a business publication.

Elaine Mardis on Cancer in Technology Review

dd — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:40:50 +0000

Elaine Mardis, Co-Director of The Genome Center has a brief article in the January/February 2009 issue of Technology Review discussing the application of next-generation sequencing technologies to cancer research entitled Cancer Genomics: DNA sequencing will transform our understanding of cancer. In the same issue, there is an article that discusses the oncoming age of genomics, including its affect on personalized medicine, “third-generation” sequencing technology player Pacific Biosciences, and the Personal Genome Project.

Pacific Biosciences

admin — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:45:00 +0000

I mentioned Pacific Biosciences in my first post about AGBT 2008. A faithful reader pointed me to this article in the New York Times entitled The Race to Read Genomes on a Shoestring, Relatively Speaking. It discusses PacBio and has a quote from Elaine Mardis.

AGBT 2008, part 1

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:47:00 +0000

I have been meaning to write about what I saw at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting a couple weeks ago, but have not had time to sit and generate a long post. So I will try to post several shorter entries as I get time.

The best session at AGBT was on Saturday afternoon, Future Horizons in Genome Exploration (chaired by my boss Elaine Mardis). It started with an entertaining talk by Stephan Schuster about the mammoth genome. Mammoths are about as close to modern-day elephants as humans are to chimps. John Leamon from RainDance Technologies gave a talk on their very cool microfluidics platform, complete with cool movies (yes, movies not animations). The session ended with a presentation by Pacific Biosciences Founder and CTO Stephen Turner about their single molecule, real time sequencing platform. Think about sequencing an entire human genome to tenfold redundancy in a matter of hours. That’s a lot of data to analyze and store.