Let's please stop calling it NGS
Geraldine_VdAuwera
Cambridge, MAMember, Administrator, Broadie admin
Can we all agree that this is 2016 and next-generation sequencing is really just sequencing at this point?
Seriously, I was in college when NGS was becoming a thing. In techno-geological terms, that was the Cretaceous. Yet over a decade later, this super-vague term is somehow still stuck in our collective consciousness.
I'm not the one to say what is the real next generation of sequencing, maybe Nanopore and all that exotic long-read tech. My point is that calling the current generation of sequencing technology next-gen or NGS is embarrassingly retrograde and we should all stop*.
*I'm sure we have some old articles in our docs that use the term NGS, if you point them out to me I'll fix them.
Of course, there's still Sanger sequencing and we want to be able to tell the difference -- but really, isn't it Sanger that is the oddball now, and the rest is just regular sequencing? Well, if we must -- hey look we have a technically-accurate term, it's called high-throughput sequencing. It even comes with a reasonably snappy three-letter abbreviation to slap in titles and on posters where space is at a premium: HTS (putting the hts in htsjdk).
Alright, rant over. Until next time.
Comments
Only potential issue is that HTS also stands for high throughput screening.
NGS also stands for National Geodetic Survey. Yay context.
Also, I don't mind if it forces people to disambiguate by saying exactly what they used instead of using meaninglessly general terms...
For what it is worth, I actually think it should be something akin to Automated Sequencing Platform (ASP).
Given the variety of sequencing platforms, e.g. Illumina, PacBio, IonTorrent, SOLiD and Oxford Nanopore, as well as within platform methods, e.g. Illumina's patterned and non-patterned flowcells, perhaps we should do away with all the acronyms and always specify the platform and machine, e.g. Illumina HiSeqX sequencing.
Automated Sequencing Platform is even less meaningful -- you can get Sanger sequencing done by robots and that would qualify.
Agreed, @shlee. That's pretty much Keith Bradnam's argument in the blog post I linked above. He argued the point much better than my lunchtime rant of the other day -- so it's extra frustrating that two whole years later there's still a need to rehash this.