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If you’re into mass sequencing, the $1000 genome and all that jazz, you’ve probably already seen the paper in today’s Nature from the Rothberg group at Life Technologies, on the Ion Torrent sequencing technology.

There’s a rather scathing take-down of the paper (not the technology itself, mind) by Daniel MacArthur over on his Wired blog.

Ion Torrent was forced into a dilemma of its own making: either spend an obscene amount of money to generate a high-quality sequence, or spend a simply lewd amount of cash to generate a crappy sequence.

–Daniel MacArthur

The main focus of the attack is a statistical sleight of hand that really shouldn’t have got past peer review. There’s also what appears (to me) to be an unreasonably short time between submission and acceptance for such a complex paper, even in Nature (Paul Riley’s super article on the potential for repairing damaged hearts–free evaluation here–took well over a year!), so one does wonder what was going on with the reviewers and editors.

I’m looking forward to reading what other people think of the paper (it should attract a lot of geek attention–they sequenced the genome of Gordon Moore. Yes, that Moore). And be assured that I’ll look out for any F1000 evaluations of the Rothberg paper and let you know about them.