Update for the week ending 12/14:
SEQanswers.com Forum has had its busiest week yet, when for the first time, community members have made more new posts than I have! I'm going to try to put together a weekly (maybe bi-weekly?) post which highlights the topics being discussed on our forums.
1. In response to my call for information about the George Church next-gen sequencer, member #11 pmcget posted some very interesting insider information about the "Polonator". (See post #4 in this thread)
2. New user colicoli shares some detailed workflow information about Nimblegen array enrichment and competing technologies from the Church consortium (See post #4 in this thread)
3. User questions! We're starting to get user questions which I cannot thoroughly answer on my own, so this is where community participation will be key. The new General forum has two questions: Moscow user Michael L. Altshuler asks about the use of specific terminology for describing sequencing metrics such as accuracy and coverage, and colicoli poses some important questions regarding the costs of the specific nucleotides used in the next gen platforms.
4. New forums. In response to user suggestions, I have opened a Bioinformatics forum for discussions of computational issues/questions/problems related to next-gen sequencing. To initiate the forum, I posted a summary of a new paper which describes a next-gen sequencing assembly algorithm which was specifically coded to run on economical graphics processors. Cool stuff. I've also created a General forum to hold questions/topics that don't fit in any of the other subdivisions.
OK that's it for this week. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the site, and to everyone who is reading the site. I would encourage you to share the site with colleagues that might be interested.