Comments on: AGBT: Speculating on Third Gen Tech

By: Great Content from the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) Conference | Persistent Change

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:34:56 +0000

[...] After submitting this post, Luke Jostins informative analysis of the presented 3rd generation sequencers. This includes products from Life Technologies, Pacific Biosciences, and Oxford [...]

By: Veerle

Veerle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:34:24 +0000

Awsome blog, thanks a million.

By: Luke

Luke — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:19:29 +0000

Yeah, Illumina and Nanopore entered into an exclusive contract to market, sell and distribute Nanopore machines early last year:

http://investor.illumina.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=121127&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1242758

By: james@cancer

james@cancer — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:14:13 +0000

Are Illumina ‘marketing’ Oxford nanopre now? I knew they had some investment but not that this was so far under their wing?

By: Stanley Han

Stanley Han — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:06:24 +0000

A dsDNA or ssDNa binding domain may be attached to the exonulease to reduce the dissociation rate and thereby increase read length.

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:21:37 +0000

@clive

No problem; I wasn’t trying to push you into saying things that you weren’t ready to say, and I understand why you have to keep quiet. Thanks for stopping by, and hopefully hear something data-wise from you soon!

By: Clive G. Brown

Clive G. Brown — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:09:26 +0000

Hi Luke -

I couldn’t resist comment – but we are not currently discussing technology publicly beyond what is published or available on our website. I know that is frustrating but there are good commercial reasons for it. We are working very hard to ensure it is worth the wait and the results are very competitive.

Nature provides.

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:45:46 +0000

@Clive

Thanks for the info. I sort of assumed that given how long-lived exonucleases are in the wild, they would live pretty much forever (or at least several days) inside your machine. That you can replace the nanopores mid-run is awesome, though.

The decay for your machine that I’m talking about in this post is not decay of the pore or the exonuclease, but the read length decay caused by the disassociation of the DNA from the exonuclease, which I would guess it the major limiting factor in generating long reads (and the decay parameter for this being the driver of the median read length). Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

By: Clive G. Brown

Clive G. Brown — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:29:13 +0000

Hi,

The half life of an engineered exonuclease can be very long. As there are no lasers or dyes in the system, there is no photodamage of enzymes or DNA – a major limitation of the fluorescence based systems. Nanopores can be flushed away and replaced with fresh ones during a run.