RocketHub.com DNA Sequencing Project

[bwallace]

Has anyone seen this?

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/25042-world-s-lowest-cost-genetic-sequencing

[kcchan]

This seems very fishy to me. All they have is a flashy Youtube video and some vague descriptions on their website. There's absolutely no information on their methods or technology. Since they're asking for so little funding, the test is probably not a new sequencing technology.

[math_guy]

This seems very fishy to me. All they have is a flashy Youtube video and some vague descriptions on their website. There's absolutely no information on their methods or technology. Since they're asking for so little funding, the test is probably not a new sequencing technology.

it is legit. i seriously doubt that anyone, other than a handful of our friends and family, will ever really contribute. but it is for real.

we hacked the proton protocol for one part of what we figured out. and then we borrowed a ton of super-computing time for the rest of it. we tested it and hammered out the bugs. now we have it figured out, we think.

basically, we figured out how to re-create the cancer gene tests that are current today but in a way that actually works. we never miss a gene and we never make an error (so far at least...we still have less than half of the complete set of genes). and we can jam a ton of people onto one run.

anyhow, just wanted to say all that since you seemed to think we were fishy. we're not. we just wanna try to finish making this test so that we can run more samples and therefore get better results in our lab...and if it works for us then we wanna make it available to other labs FOR FREE until we run out of our master mixes (which, hopefully, is thousands of sample runs). we didn't talk about the tech too much cuz it is too complicated for a crowd-sourcing site, in our opinion.

also, if any cancer labs have any ideas (or even read this post) and they would like to share with us any new/interesting additional regions that we could scan for (in the cancer genome only) then that would also be nice. we have a little more bandwidth than we were expecting and thought that adding some additional genes or other regions might make sense. if we couldn't decide on anything then were just gonna add some promoter regions or anything that seemed of interest near those exons (don't laugh at us for our ideas...we are math and computer guys for the most part and sometimes come up with stupid ideas when it comes to biochem).

[kcchan]

Hi math_guy,

Thanks for your reply. I apologize for sounding so negative in my first post. I'm always weary of claims like "99.9999%" accuracy without any solid data to back it up. An extra decimal place is a 10 fold decrease in error rate, so it's important to have results that compares your methods with others to validate yours numbers.

That said, your project seems very promising. I like that you're going after a crowd sourcing model to get the general public involved with science. I would suggest speaking with people at other projects like uBiome to see if you can get tips to increase your success rate for funding. Good luck!

-kcchan

[math_guy]

Hi math_guy,

Thanks for your reply. I apologize for sounding so negative in my first post. I'm always weary of claims like "99.9999%" accuracy without any solid data to back it up. An extra decimal place is a 10 fold decrease in error rate, so it's important to have results that compares your methods with others to validate yours numbers.

That said, your project seems very promising. I like that you're going after a crowd sourcing model to get the general public involved with science. I would suggest speaking with people at other projects like uBiome to see if you can get tips to increase your success rate for funding. Good luck!

-kcchan

don't worry about sounding negative. we did sort of struggle with how to make that video. thanks for the wishes! and i will see if we can talk to any other groups as well. that is definitely one thing that we have not done much of because we were so nervous, in the beginning, that someone would swipe our methodology and try to patent it. that is the last thing we wanted since we plan to make it public.

anyhow, again thanks for the good luck. we will need it!