Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by frisco 4354 days ago
This is what my startup is working on! Check out https://www.transcriptic.com. It's still early days and we'd love feedback.
2 comments

I'm not bullish on this field. While there are certain biological operations (e.g. sequencing) that are "embarassingly parallelizable" (to borrow a CS concept), most are not, and require aggressive "interrupt handling".

I make a mutation of enzyme X, then test it. Ok, the procedure works, now let's scale it to 48 mutants. Uh oh, the procedure stopped working at #28. Why? Because the batch number for our competent cells from NEB changed and it no longer accepts our plasmid. (real situation) Etc.

That looks interesting, but a bit confusing.

Imagine I want to do a PCR but can't do it myself, I must really a) have no bio facilities to speak of, b) don't know anyone else who does. What am I then going to do with the PCR product? Further, presumably I must also sent you the sample to amplify, and what kind of samples am I likely to have if have no bio facilities?

You might want to read the comments made elsewhere about something similar: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/07/09/outsourced_a...