Omicsomics.blogspot.com

Another edition of my dabbling with AI.  Somewhat like what I reported before - a customer asked if Ginkgo Cloud Lab's Echo-MS option could configure an assay to replicate the analytical results in a published paper, so I'm using Claude to do the heavy lifting.  Plus part of what I described earlier showed some issues on review.  But the big thing I'm keying into this morning is Claude is having difficulty with accessing a major chemical catalog I pointed it at - and I wonder how long that situation will be tenable. Читать дальше...

Vibe coding - solving problems by extended conversation with a machine learning program rather than writing the code yourself - is all the rage.  But I hadn't really been partaking, finding one excuse after another.  I don't have time.  It's a lazy approach to the craft I've honed.  Abandonment of my skills.   But I've also taken to referring to myself as a "lapsed computational biologist", as I was never doing any coding - or looking at biological data.  I'm business development now, which is a bit of a euphemism for salesperson. Читать дальше...

The liquid biopsy space continues to grow and heat up - just this week Roche's Foundation Medicine unit announced the acquisition of Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) test developer Saga Diagnostics for just over a half billion dollars.  Numerous MRD and Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) companies continue to spring up, with even more analyte types - first it was cell-free DNA, but now cell-free RNA and exosomes have entered the picture and probably a bunch more.  Extracting DNA from biofluids - mostly plasma... Читать дальше...

AGBT Agriculture was a really nice meeting - lovely venue in the Arizona desert, a meeting size that you felt you could (but weren't compelled to) introduce yourself to everyone, good food, great scientific content, and everyone super-friendly.  I came for the workshops on Sunday, and there were two on graph genomes / pangenomes.  Which was a theme throughout the meeting - not every talk or paper mentioned these topics, but a huge fraction did.  The agriculture world - both plant and animal (hmmm... Читать дальше...

I'm headed over to AGBT Agriculture tomorrow, after getting to Phoenix ahead of time to check out some sights.  The Desert Botanical Garden is amazing, particularly since it stays open until 10pm and so you can watch the lighting change as the sun sets and then enjoy some artistic artificial lighting on some of the trails.  Before I left, a few daffodils were in bloom back at my home.  So while I have plants on the mind, I'll unleash another plant engineering fantasy but this time with a dose of... Читать дальше...

About a year ago we took a family vacation to the Netherlands with a prime goal to see tulips - and tulips we did see!  Even a rainy day (what are the odds of that in Holland?) couldn't steal the magic from the famed Keukenhof Gardens, and outside the renowned Rijksmuseum was a spectacular tulip bed.  I'm now dealing with one side effect of that trip - I went a bit overboard ordering bulbs on our return and because our garage is a bit warmer than outside I now have many pots of bulbs which are... Читать дальше...

I've loved the n6tec icon96 instrument since they first tipped me about it several years back.  The idea of running 96 independent PCRs in parallel was just too attractive; the instrument I'd always dreamed of. I never take payments from companies I write about, but probably could make a reasonable claim on commissions for a few icon96 units - I have a hard time not going into total fanboy mode.  But not everybody works in batches that are multiples of 96 - and now at ABRF n6 has launched an affordable option... Читать дальше...

After Roche's AGBT presentation, a key question for many is "who is going to buy an Axelios?".  Below are some thoughts on the topic, based around general classes of sequencing labs that exist in the world.

In my current role I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. A core task is to identify possible customers, and LinkedIn is rich hunting ground. I'm still sending each reach-out message individually (though admittedly often by pasting a message copied from a growing bank of crafted pitches), so even if I wasn't morally opposed to broad spamming I don't have the bandwidth for it. LinkedIn offers many ways for possible customers to reveal their interests - there's one's profile, any posts you make, comments on other posts, and what you hit like on. Читать дальше...

Even before new CEO Francis Van Parys took the reins at Oxford Nanopore with the start of the month, the company had made yet another priming to the instrument lineup. The sample-to-answer ElysION has been sent to its eternal rest, presumably in the nicer part of Hades