Post-apres-next generation sequencing

<RANT>
OK, I don’t like the term “next generation sequencing”. It is a relative term, points at a changing target, and therefore inexact. What is the “this-generation sequencing”? Sanger? 454 used to be “next generation”, but now 454 sequencing went from 100bp to 600bp per read, making it qualitatively different.. so “post-next generation sequencing”? If you want to describe a sequencing technology call it what it is: title the technology by something more descriptive than a relative term that has built-in obsolescence, even the company name & machine is better. That’s what everybody use in their lab conversation & emails anyway. Illumina/SOliD is “short read”, 454 is “pyrosequencing”, Pacific Biosciences is Single Molecule Real Time, etc, etc.

</RANT>

Having got that out of my system, here is the latest cool thing, this time from Oxford Nanopore: an exonuclease trims off the bases one by one. Those go into a membrane pore with an adapter molecule that recognizes the nucleotide going through it:  it can even recognize methylated Cytosine, commonly referred to as “the fifth DNA base”.


James Clarke, Hai-Chen Wu, Lakmal Jayasinghe, Alpesh Patel, Stuart Reid, Hagan Bayley (2009). Continuous base identification for single-molecule nanopore DNA sequencing Nature Nanotechnology DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2009.12

http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2009/02/oxford_nanopore_making_progres.php

Share and Enjoy:
  • Fark
  • Digg
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • PDF
  • email
  • Print
  • Google Bookmarks

Comments are closed.