Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Like PCR, but does not require thermal cycling. Thus the "isothermal" in the name: iso means same, so "same temperature".

Not needing the thermo cycling means that the equipment needed is much smaller and cheaper it seems.

Trade-offs question: biology.stackexchange.com/questions/92172/what-are-the-trade-offs-between-polymerase-chain-reaction-pcr-vs-loop-mediated

One single universal wavefunction, and every possible outcomes happens in some alternate universe. Does feel a bit sad and superfluous, but also does give some sense to perceived "wave function collapse".

This is one of the the key innovations of the Illumina (originally Solexa) sequencing.

This step is genius because sequencing is basically a signal-to-noise problem, as you are trying to observe individual tiny nucleotides mixed with billions of other tiny nucleotides.

With bridge amplification, we group some of the nucleotides together, and multiply the signal millions of times for that part of the DNA.

Bought by Illumina for 600 million in 2007 for 600 million dollars.

This is one of the prime examples of Europe's decline.

Instead of trying to dominate the sequencing market and gain trillions of dollars from it, they local British early stage investors were more than happy to get a 20x return on their small initial investments, and sold out to the Americans who will then make the real profit.

And now Solexa doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, while Illumina is set out to be the next Microsoft. What a disgrace.

Here are some good articles about the company:

Cambridge visitors can still visit the Panton Arms pub, which was the location of the legendary "hey we should talk" founders meeting, chosen due to its proximity to the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge.

In 2021 the founders were awarded the Breakthrough Prize. The third person awarded was Pascal Mayer. He was apparently at Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute at the time of development. They do have a wiki page unlike Solexa: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serono. They paid a 700 million fine in 2005 in the United States, and sold out in 2006 to Merck for 10 billion USD.

Bibliography:

One reasonable and memorable approximation excluding any fine structure is:see for example example: hydrogen 1-2 spectral line.

Kind of a synonym for hydrogen emission spectrum not very clear if fine structure is considered by this term or not.

A line set for hydrogen spectral line.

Formula discovered in 1885, was it the first set to have an empirical formula?

A gene that was inherited from the same ancestor in two different species, and which has maintained the same function in both species.

A gene that got duplicated withing the same species. The copies may diverge in function from the original.

Important example: hox genes.

This was the original name of Google Search.

One wonders if this name has some influence from the LGBT culture in San Francisco! The sexual innuendo is palpable.

"Back" is of course a reference to "backlinks", since Google Search relies on incoming links (AKA backlinks) to a webpage to determine its importance.