The ability to rapidly and effectively evaluate the performance of customized next-generation sequencing (NGS) panels is critical to provide high-quality sequencing solutions to customers. New England Biolabs®, together with Directed Genomics®, is developing a new offering, NEBNext Direct® Custom Ready Panels, which will allow researchers to select from a large library of genes for which baits have been developed and optimized, thus enabling rapid deployment of customized target-enrichment panels. Directed Genomics has been collaborating with SeraCare Life Sciences in order to streamline the optimization and characterization of NEBNext Direct target enrichment panels.

If you took a university introductory statistics course, you may have learned the distinction between accuracy and precision. It may likely have been presented with an archery analogy, where ‘Accurate’ was represented by arrows loosely clustered around the target’s bull’s-eye, ‘Precise’ was shown as a tight grouping displaced from the center, and ‘Accurate and Precise’ was depicted as what every archer aims for, a tight grouping directly at the bull’s-eye. Suddenly, words that are used interchangeably in everyday conversation took on dramatically different meanings.

The Keystone Symposia is an organization with 44 years of history on specialized topics across the fields of molecular and cellular biology. This week in Banff, Alberta, Canada is a Keystone Symposia conference called The Cancer Genome, along with a joint meeting on Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Their Twitter description (@KeystoneSymp) describes the Keystone organization as “A catalyst for accelerating life science discovery and connecting scientists within and across disciplines at symposia worldwide”.

It is hard to believe that next-generation sequencing has only been around for a little over ten years, but has had a profound impact on many frontiers of basic and applied genetics. To contrast the first-generation (Sanger sequencing by capillary electrophoresis) and the next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches, we provide you with this infographic.

The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) was founded 'to provide structure and leadership to the emerging field of molecular diagnostics', and publishes the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

In 2011, the National Academy of Science published the results of a year-long committee effort called ‘Toward Precision Medicine: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease’. This committee was charged to explore the feasibility and need to develop a new taxonomy of human disease based upon molecular biology, with the concept that with an explosion of molecular data about individuals with disease, there was a great untapped opportunity to use these data to improve health. FLICKR, JOHN GOODE