[cibertech]

Rothberg's comments are perhaps a bit extreme, and always comes with the 'he's a competitor' tag, but after the initial euphoria, lot of people at AGBT associated with both genome sequencing technology and genomics had some reservations. The general mood was 'this is a great technology, but show me the real data'.

I agree. After what happened with PacBio and Helicos (should I dare to say disappointment) the scientific community is much more careful now. That doesn’t mean ONT will not deliver, but until they can show real evidence of what they claimed, they will be seen with suspicion.

[MJW]

GenoMax/larissa
Be aware Illumina also made an $18 million investment in Oxford Nanopore when they entered a strategic alliance in January 2009.

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

[ians]

So has that lambda data been released yet??

[MJW]

ians - No lamda data yet, so far as I am aware, although the company did raise another $50m or so recently from existing shareholders. http://www.nanoporetech.com/news/press-releases/view/40

[rboettcher]

Hey all,

Interesting to read in the whole thread though I'm not really able to participate since I just recently joined the Seq community. So could anyone give me a short summary of what happened with the different platforms and how the market is developing at the moment? There has been so much going on that I lost track completely compared to what we were told during my studies (which was mainly focussing on the different techniques).
In short: who is still in business and which techniques survived so far?

Cheers

[steinmann]

Hey all,

Interesting to read in the whole thread though I'm not really able to participate since I just recently joined the Seq community. So could anyone give me a short summary of what happened with the different platforms and how the market is developing at the moment? There has been so much going on that I lost track completely compared to what we were told during my studies (which was mainly focussing on the different techniques).
In short: who is still in business and which techniques survived so far?

Cheers

Illumina: Market leader.

Life: Could become market leader with their Proton sequencer in the near future.

Oxford Nanopore: Super cool technology but seriously lacks credibility. Remains to be seen whether they can live up to their promises.

The rest: Might be intesting in 5+ years or failed already.

[HESmith]

Are you forgetting the Roche 454 system, or was the omission intentional?

[steinmann]

454 used to be a viable option for certain appications, but nobody in their right mind would buy one of their sequencers today. Not with Illumina and Ion Torrent approaching 400 bp reads.

Helicos is pretty much dead.

PacBio is still alive and possibly intersting for niche appication but unlikely be able to survive on that.

[zaratieg]

Availability?

Does anyone have any info as to the date of commercial availability of the MinION?
Back in february they said 6-9 months, but not a peep since.
As a matter of fact, has anyone seen one of these in the wild? or anywhere for that matter?

[pmiguel]

Okay, this is anecdotal, but my wife was at an NIH awardees meeting in Washington a few months ago. This was for an education grant. One of the plenary speakers was Francis Collins. During his talk he held up a device about the size of a thumb drive and made some comments about the rapid progress of sequencing.

The weird thing was that he referred to this device as an Ion Torrent. But after the talk, as he was leaving the room, my wife asked him -- is than a MinIon? And he said that it was.

--
Phillip

[zaratieg]

The weird thing was that he referred to this device as an Ion Torrent.

--
Phillip

That is awesome. Thanks for the laugh!

[cibertech]

May I ask why is this anecdotal?

[zaratieg]

I think he meant it as either the acceptation of anecdotal as unreliable because it was seen only once, and besides not attached to a USB port churning out sequence, or the acceptation of "funny story" because Collins can't keep his ions straight.

[cibertech]

I see. Thanks for the clarification.
In any case, as for unreliability, the fact that has only been seen once doesnt mean its not possible. In fact, you might have a susprise soon....

Best regards

Ezequiel

[pmiguel]

Yeah, who knows if that was a live MinIon. Could have been, but it also could have been a mock-up given him by ONT. Or a random thumb drive. Also I wasn't there and this was a talk given to an audience not expert in sequencing tech. So he may just have been trying to make a point. Or meant something else...

--
Phillip