SOLiD Saga

At PolITiGenomics, David Dooling points out a letter that the senior director of scientific operations at ABI, Kevin McKernan, wrote to the UK House of Lords last November. In it, he says that the Sanger Centre is biased against ABI due to the company's association with Craig Venter during the human genome sequencing race and says the center had close ties to Solexa. The Sanger Centre returned five SOLiD instruments and instead purchased more Illumina Genome Analyzers — McKernan's letter included a news story from our sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News on the return of the instruments. "It doesn't seem right to impugn someone else's character in that way when there are countless other reasons -- scientific reasons -- why the Sanger Institute would make that choice," Dooling says to Nature's The Great Beyond blog.