Omics! Omics!

In my previous post about the Model Hardware Standard from Anthropic, I mentioned some exploration I've been running on instrument APIs.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, announced a new initiative called the Model Hardware Standard (MHS).

An interesting preprint showed up last week in the autonomous agent-driven experimentation space - an area I'm paid to be very interested in.

The Society for Industrial Microbiology (SIMB) annual meeting in Austin the first week of the month was great fun.

PacBio had a major shakeup early this month.

I wish to highlight an interesting new preprint from a group at Danish Technical University which explores the schmutz in PCR reactions, demonstrates some surprising conclusions, shows how their results might be very relevant to a common use of amplicon s…

My father was a very methodical person, and that particularly applied when he decided to purchase the second IBM PC clone to appear on the market.

Last week news broke that Element Biosciences had won a patent lawsuit against Illumina, and that it affected MiSeq.

A recent publication in Molecular Cell involving Fiber-Seq caught my attention, though I've since discovered this preprinted over a year ago.

Okay, this is one of those cases where I kvetch about other people not having built the tools I want to use - perhaps a bit of a insufferably egotistical position.

I caught up by teleconference recently with Countable Labs CEO Giovanna Prout, fresh off Countable Labs' $26M equity fundraising - a round which was oversubscribed.

An interesting news item this week is that BioNano Genomics has appointed Alex Hastie as Chief Scientific Officer.

Another interesting preprint that fits several recent themes - genome minimization, discontinuation of products - comes from a Japanese group that reports on significantly reducing the genome of E.coli.

There's an interesting new preprint from Jay Shendure's lab which introduces the technique of Shred-Seq, which is a Cas3-driven approach to generating large deletions across a large eukaryotic genome.

Last week brought news that Standard Biotools, which is what Fluidigm morphed into, is being acquired by Treeline Biosciences, a drug developer.

Alexander Hoischen and colleagues have a brief piece in New England Journal of Medicine that published early this morning, in conjunction with the European Society of Human Genomics (ESHG) meeting.

The last bit of Craig Venter's career a followed, often a bit green with envy, was his work to build genomes.

Few bombshells have hit genomics like the day in May 1998 when Craig Venter and Applied Biosystems announced he would be launching Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome by a complete shotgun approach.

In the early 1990s, Craig Venter left the NIH over disputes around the patenting of ESTs.

I am overdue in getting back to my very personal review of how the recently passed J.

The Festival of Genomics, Biodata and AI - thankfully known as FoG and not FogBA or FogBDA - will be at the Boston convention center this Wednesday and Thursday.

Now to run through the long term technical projections from Oxford Nanopore's Tech Talk.

I returned from London Calling 2026 much as I usually have - exhausted, more than a little hoarse, happy for discussions had and ruing connections missed.

My series on Craig Venter is on a small pause since I didn't get it out before I arrived here in London for Oxford Nanopore's annual shindig at Old Billingsgate.

Venter's big Expressed Sequence Tag - soon known as ESTs - paper came out in June during my final summer as an intern; I photocopied it at my internship.