One strand long, or a billion strands short โ
and what file comes out?
Illumina did not win on accuracy โ it won on count. It plants 400 million strands on one glass slide and repeats add-one-letter, photograph, cleave 300 times.
These 20 lessons open that machine first โ SBS chemistry, flow cells, cartridges and single-use consumables. Then they go down to the bench for RNA extraction, RIN, library prep and index pooling, and finally take BCL, FASTQ and the count table apart line by line, carrying six bulk RNA-seq samples all the way to a volcano plot. Python runs right inside this page. There is nothing to install.
How you'll learn
Where one reversible terminator lands and stops, whether to take four photographs or two, what happens when two fragments land in one nanowell โ you see what the machine does first.
Six hours out of the freezer, exactly one well you open yourself, the list of what gets thrown away per run and what it costs per sample โ the actual handling and the actual money, in tables.
A wrong reference, a skipped DNase step, a batch confounded with condition โ none of them raises an error. The table comes out fine and only the conclusion is wrong. You meet all five with your own hands.
Every lesson has a laboratory widget โ loading concentration, RIN, index type, replicate count, normalisation method, all turned by you until the conclusion flips.