Wow, I have won an Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine!

I am pleased to announce that I have won an Ion Torrent PGM in Life Technologies' European competition. I am currently in Lausanne, Switzerland for the formal announcement of the award. A press release and further details should be appearing any moment now on the press release section of Life Technologies’ web site and on their forum.

I am very excited about exploring the potential of Ion Torrent technology for unravelling the genomic epidemiology of bacterial pathogens in hospitals. We and others have already established the potential of high-throughput sequencing for this application. I am fortunate that in that I already have funding from the British Medical Research Council to genome-sequence over a hundred isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii using established approaches (454 and Illumina), plus the recent launch of a NIHR Centre for Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology in Birmingham brings additional opportunities for genomic epidemiology of infection in trauma patients. We are thus well placed to benchmark Ion Torrent against other technologies for this purpose and exploit this technology to do more work more quickly and more cheaply than we could with established approaches.

I am looking forward to taking receipt of an Ion Torrent instrument in the next month or two and will keep readers posted with our experience of the PGM. But for now, I had better get back to that glass of Champagne!