Julian Garneau

Extremely clever new NGS tech from Roche 🧬 If it's hard to discriminate between nucleic acids accurately with a nanopore, why not synthesize a new polymer off a DNA template that is easier to sequence? It's an intuitively simple idea, but took *a ton* of creative nucleic acid chemistry + enzyme engineering to design modified NTPs and create polymers of them. It's been very interesting to see Roche move into the NGS market, and time will tell how this stacks up with the growing set of totally orthogonal approaches people are cooking up for sequencing tech. It feels like we are entering another renaissance for biological measurement infrastructure—which is super important. “Progress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order." - Sydney Brenner (These animations of sequencing tech will never get old to me. What a time to be a biologist!)