My life while the world spins madly on...

Thoughts arising while working as a scientist or just randomly spinning from my brain.

I don't give a damn, I'm happy as a clam, nobody knows me at all

[This and the section title borrowed from the Weepies - great lyrics.]

Everything here is just what I think and does not represent opinion of my employer or anybody else. See the Impressum.

Tuesday, 10 July 2012

journal club yesterday

yesterday John, a postdoc of Mark's, gave a cool journal club on this paper:

Koren, Schatz, Walens: Hybrid error correction and de novo assembly of single-molecule sequencing reads. doi:10.1038/nbt.2280 

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.2280.html

They try to improve PacBio long DNA sequencing reads which have a massive error rare of ~15% with short Illumina (and possibly 454) reads. And yes, that seems to work. However, there are some crucial data missing from their analysis. Then some parts of the paper are a strange accumulation of we did this, that, and that, and yes this as well - and nobody quite gets why. Well and in the very end, it's not really cheap and also not very fast. Although PacBio is fast, one has to generate the Illumina data anyway, which cost time. Then the PacBio throughput is still very low and consequently to do this for a reasonable sized eucaryotic genome should easily get you into regions above EUR 30K or so. All in all, it's pretty much a good commercial trying to rescue PacBio.

 

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