Humor - Announcement of a New Sequencing Technology

For today’s comic relief, here is a press release forwarded to us by a reader.

A new sequencing technology enters the ring: SHTseq(TM)

Just received this press release from Neil Hall, CEO of a new sequencing company called CrapBio whos launching at this years #notAGBT.. sounds very interesting!

CrapBio

CrapBio is excited to announce the release of its new SHTseq whole genome sequencing platform which is going to revolutionize the genomics industry and soon the healthcare industry.

SHTseq

SHTseq or Super High-throughput Template sequencing is a totally new paradigm for DNA analysis. In the era of second and third generation sequencing, scientists would take days to extract DNA and prepare it for analysis on slow cumbersome analysis machines. CrapBio is able to get around this using AngstromRealtimeSensors that can accurately read the DNA while still inside cells. Better than that, you dont even need to take the DNA to the analysis machine you can simply take an image of the organism you wish to sequence and upload it to the SHTcloud and have the DNA information extracted directly by out highly trained SHTtechnicians.

With SHTseq you can simply send the sample from you iphone and have the sequencing data returned to your email address in a matter of minutes. THATS RIGHT!, you can have a SHT experiment run in minutes! Not hours or days. Download your iSHT app now and start sequencing.

Longer Reads-Better Data noSHT (What would you do with 100Mb reads?).

We are able to generate super-long reads with our ARSesnsors. Using CrapBio- SHTseq technology we regularly get 10Mb reads and we have even seen reads of 100Mb which completely sequenced E. coli 20 times in a single read. Our base calling accuracy is 25%, but with genomes with extreme AT/GC bias it reaches 40%. Although this is lower than other platforms the longer reads allow you to extract much more information from our reads than old-fashioned 2nd generation sequencers. Also this error is totally randomly distributed (unlike homopolymer errors in other technologies!) and there is no decline in base calling accuracy toward the ends of reads. The last base in a read is just as good as the first base.

Please follow the rest of the press release at this link.

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And here is something for the ‘not so humorous’ column. We just found out that the website hosting the largest number of software codes to analyze ABI SOLiD data has been abandoned.

Anyone knows what is going on? What has the world come to during our month of absence?