Abrus Founders Chris and Michael on NG Proteomics Sequencing

Listen to this episode from The Geonomics Podcast on Spotify. DNA sequencing swept the world in two waves: first of all Sanger sequencing, developed in the '70s and the underpinning of the 2000's Human Genome Project, and then NGS which drove the cost of a human genome sequence from billions to thousand of dollars from 2006 onwards.Echoing that history, protein sequencing is now in its first innings, dominated by technologies that provide proteomic fingerprints but not the de novo sequencing that makes NGS the powerful tool it is.So it was a real privilege to sit this week with my two brilliant friends Michael Graige and Chris MacDonald and talk about the basics of proteomics, and how their stealthy company Abrus Bio is competing in the race to Next Generation Proteomics, NGP.There are so many things I like about this company!- Michael and Chris learned their craft way back at Illumina so they're all about building not bullshitting.- They use off-the-shelf NGS as their readout mechanism, making their product simply (🤣) an amino-acid-to-DNA reactor with a razor/razorblade business model- They treat DNA as bits, and so can tag both the amino acid sequences and post translational modifications with barcodes and read those post NGS in the bioinformatics.Anyway, this is a great conversation whether you're interested in learning the basics of proteomics (why it's hard, why it's 'uuuge) or the details of Abrus' approach. Take a listen!