Horrors Of The Theoretical Maximum
Today is Halloween1 so I want to tell you a horror story. What if all vendors started quoting Maximum Theoretical Output like Oxford Nanopore! 😲😲😲😲
PacBio
The Revio chip has 25 million wells. Theoretically each of those wells could be producing a read. That would be 375Gb/run (as opposed to the current 120Gb spec). But wait, there’s more! Perhaps we should normalize this for a 72 hour run time to make it consistent with Oxford? And also, it’s not really reasonable to compare simplex versus PacBio Hifi… so…
PacBio’s instruments incorporate about 3 bases per second. That gives a theoretical maximum of:
Oxford Nanopore
We don’t need to guess in Oxford’s case as they already state it as 290Gb. Wow… not even 1Tb!
Illumina
Illumina have a “25B” flow cell on the NovaSeq X. This produces 8Tb at 2x150bp. Assuming a PF rate of 80% we’re looking at ~10Tb. But that’s only a 48h run, so let’s boost that by 1.5 giving us:
Summary
Of course, the above is just a horrible horrible dream of a world where vendors quote theoretical numbers, not the expected or guaranteed run output. One where you can never be sure how much data you will get from a run. And when faced with a poor run vendors can simply smile kindly and say:
“The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.”
Of course… this is not the world we live in. Or would want to live in…
It’s already the 31st here in Japan.