This is nearly a month old now but Keith Bradnam’s ACGT blog a while back drew my attention to the June 2015 edition of Lex Nederbragt’s Developments in high throughput sequencing in which he plots Gigabases* per run against (log) read length (*the human genome is about 3Gb):
I’m particularly excited by the two technologies on the right of this graph, which represent the latest single molecule “long read” sequencing technologies, both of which we now have access to through the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics. In fact, we got our first data from the PacBio RS II (right) and it’s looking good! (More on that later.)
Despite being a bioinformatician with a background in genetics, I have been keeping my distance a bit from “next generation sequencing” as the technical challenges of dealing with short read data far eclipse the scientific interest. (For me, that is - the kinds of things that I am most interested in do not suit short read data.) The new long read technologies are a real game changer, and I see a lot more genomics in my (and this blog’s) future.
