Any use for a 20 base sequencer?

[bios90]

Any use for it?

[SNPsaurus]

Sequencing of medically-relevant SNPs. Each target is one or a few nucleotides, so a quick PCR and read-out would have a use. Maybe still not competitive if other platforms can do more at the same cost and speed.

Expression analysis... just need a short tag of the transcript. miRNAs are short anyway. Local assembly could convert short reads into longer pseudoreads (see RAD PE assembly or Moleculo).

[austinso]

Probably not the best idea to publicize your PhD before it is complete...you don't want to get scooped.

[krobison]

A key question to ask of your technology is how it will perform in the presence of a non-clonal DNA sample. Simplest case is an essentially 50:50 mixture (heterozygote), but for other applications could it detect either an infrequent allele or many mixed alleles.

[SNPsaurus]

Yes, you could screen cell-free blood DNA for tumor alleles (at less than 1% frequency) if you had an excellent error rate and reduced the time for turning sample -> data.

[BBoy]

And more importantly, how is this better than established array technology. FET sensing of hybridization has been published time and again over the past 10 years.