Cygnus BitSeq
Today I was looking at Cygnus Bio. I heard a rumor the company is no longer active (please reach out if you know better (new@whitefordresearch.com)).
That would be a shame, because they have lots of fun pieces of sequencing technology. Just take a look at this figure from a publication last year!
Fuzzy Sequencing With BitSeq
One of the things they talk about on their website is “BitSeq”. A multi-base addition chemistry. I didn’t quite understand it from the figure on their website:
Digging a little further, we find this in the publication mentioned above:
At first I thought this was perhaps a SOLiD-style colorspace encoding. But it isn’t really. It’s just not possible to get back to the original DNA sequence using the BitSeq sequencing process. You just get fuzzy information “A or C” or “G or T”.
For some applications this will work fine. They mention things like copy number variants etc. Most counting applications will not face issues I would imagine.
They suggest however that sequencing can be faster, as they are packing more information into each cycle.