The Joy of a New Toy

Cancer Research UK's James Hadfield has been putting his lab's new HiSeq through its paces. The machine passed its validation run "with flying colours," Hadfield says on the SeqAnswers message board. "The validation run was a pair of PE flowcells with PhiX at 36bp read lengths. We obtained 51.5 and 56.0Gb of data from the flowcells which extrapolates to just over 300Gb from the run at PE100bp," he says, adding that he was so happy to get such a boost over 200Gb that he's pretty much sold on the HiSeq. The speed of data generation combined with the machine's ability to do two flowcells per instrument is going to make the HiSeq "indispensable," Hadfield says. With so much data being generated, however, collaboration with other labs is going to be key in analyzing it all, he adds.