A small neat GUI for generating barcodes which incorporates some error checking. A very useful tool for multiplexing strategies.

Next generation sequencing offers a lot of extremely interesting opportunities, but it also presents us with at least as many difficulties – especially when you are working with ancient DNA. I have already touched upon the problem of primer contamination in the data in a previous post. Here, I want to mention a few problems with PCR artifacts.

I just saw that the Oxford journal “Bioinformatics” has made an online collection of papers on next generation sequencing published in the journal. This ‘virtual issue’ could very well turn out to be a useful resource for people working with NGS if they do a good job on keeping it up-to-date (well, at least for methods published in Bioinformatics). I just browsed the list and found a handful of interesting papers I have to read now.

From the homepage:

Next-generation sequencing technologies are revolutionising genomics and their effects are becoming increasingly widespread. Many tools and algorithms relevant to next-generation sequencing applications have been published in Bioinformatics, and so to celebrate this contribution we have gathered these together in this ‘Bioinformatics for Next Generation Sequencing’ virtual issue. This will be a living resource that we will continually update to include the very latest papers in this area to help researchers keep abreast of the latest developments.

You can find the NGS virtual issue here.

Next generation sequencing: A somewhat detailed discussion on how to look for and remove primer fragments from your reads when dealing with paired end data. The problem is general although the setting here is ancient DNA sequenced using the Illumina pipeline.

The guys at PolITGenomics has compiled a nice list of the stats for the different sequencing platforms, check it out at PolITiGenomics » Next-Generation Sequencing Informatics.