What The H*ll Is PPMSeq?
Summary: PMMSeq seems pretty cool. For me it’s the most exciting part of the platform at the moment. It’s a shame they don’t disclose how it works. But feels like it could be pretty cool for certain applications (though these may be niche applications).
What And Why
At AGBT Ultima Genomics announced a technique called PPMSeq. It’s supposed to be a duplex sequencing technique (similar in application to Twinstrand). That is it enables very high accuracy reads by reading both the forward and reverse strand of a double stranded sequence! Very high accuracy is important for certain applications (think cancer early detection, or MRD (Guandant) ) where you need to find a low abundance SNP which occurs at the same level as sequencing errors on most platforms (1 in ~1000).
How?
So how does it work? It’s not that easy unfortunately. Ultima have prepared for us an Alternate reality game where I have to go hunting through white papers and patents and avoid false leads describing PPMSeq as a UMI approach1.