genomeboy.com

There’s been a fascinating back-and-forth going on in the genome blogosphere about the pre-publication of the Applied BioSystems (i.e., Life Technologies) whole-genome sequence of a Yoruba, the seventh published whole human genome (is this still correct?), although the Yoruba one was done twice. At MassGenomics last month, Dan Koboldt took the paper’s authors to task for not offering a comparison to Illumina’s earlier sequence of the exact same genome. ABI’s Kevin McKernan responded in the comments. Meanwhile, in a guest post at Genetic Future yesterday, Luke Jostins suggested that ABI’s paper was not entirely cricket (links by me):

What follows is idle speculation, and thus (hopefully) not slander. My guess is that SOLiD is attempting to reposition itself as the Low Coverage Sequencing Company. They have still failed to topple Illumina as the market leader, and I expect that they think if enough people start thinking of SOLiD as “the guys who did a good quality 18X genome”, all the people who found the low coverage 1000 Genomes Project work sexy will start looking to SOLiD. But to do this, they had to fudge a few things: get the coverage down by cutting out lots of reads, obfuscate the low quality of heterozygous calls, and give an overenthusiastic estimate of how cheap their technology is.

Ouch. And I thought the direct-to-consumer genomics debate was rough.