Comment Re:Marketing aside, keep it in perspective. (Score 1) 82
Forgive me for getting excited about new technology in my field. And no, I do not have stock in 454. Geez, I'm a grad student, I barely have a penny to my name ;P I brought it up because it's useful in this field, pertains directly to the topic, and this is a place where all us nerds can get excited about this sort of thing.
Please tell me with a straight face that you think you would have thought up doing a thousand simultaneous PCR reactions in an oil emulsion on beads then sequencing off the beads using fluorescence on an array...and I'll eat my hat. heh. It's smrt.
Also, I'll give you, hands down, that you're right that the sequences would be shorter...let's say 5 times shorter. That'd be enough bases for most studies. Honestly, how often do you think 100 bases are gonna repeat letter for letter in the genome. Heck, the longest primer I ever had to order... for normal uses... was 45. And anyway, the sort of stuff you're sequencing using this method is not the same as what you'd use a capillary system for. We're not talking getting perfect sequences, we're talking getting enough data for stats to give us something new/interesting. It's not the be all and end all, but it's a step toward it. It's a tool for something we had poor tools for in the past, so it's a good tool.
Man, I just wanna be able to sequence all the viruses I make in one go. Anything that gets me closer to that is what I call cool. 454 might not be what I need, but it sure as heck is a step toward it.
Please tell me with a straight face that you think you would have thought up doing a thousand simultaneous PCR reactions in an oil emulsion on beads then sequencing off the beads using fluorescence on an array...and I'll eat my hat. heh. It's smrt.
Also, I'll give you, hands down, that you're right that the sequences would be shorter...let's say 5 times shorter. That'd be enough bases for most studies. Honestly, how often do you think 100 bases are gonna repeat letter for letter in the genome. Heck, the longest primer I ever had to order... for normal uses... was 45. And anyway, the sort of stuff you're sequencing using this method is not the same as what you'd use a capillary system for. We're not talking getting perfect sequences, we're talking getting enough data for stats to give us something new/interesting. It's not the be all and end all, but it's a step toward it. It's a tool for something we had poor tools for in the past, so it's a good tool.
Man, I just wanna be able to sequence all the viruses I make in one go. Anything that gets me closer to that is what I call cool. 454 might not be what I need, but it sure as heck is a step toward it.
