1. We're working from a variety of sample types (those you mentioned) as well as cultured isolates. 2. The technology demonstrated for the CDC prize takes ~20

1. We're working from a variety of sample types (those you mentioned) as well as cultured isolates. 2. The technology demonstrated for the CDC prize takes ~20 minutes to process an Illumina HiSeq run. And there's a lot of further optimization opportunity. Put differently, the bioinformatics are sufficiently fast so as to be "real time" (i.e., they could be stream processed off of a sequencer, and don't require a substantial % of additional time over the hardware runtime). 3. In general, the false positive and negative rates for our (bioinformatic/in silico) approach are very good. But, ultimately these rates also depend greatly on the underlying hardware and the sample collection, preparation, etc. protocol. 4. A) Yes, we can identify any strain across a reference library of several thousand E. coli strains. B) Yes, and we're starting with, E. coli, Salmonella, and several others. 5. Yes - but this getting rather long, so pls. e-mail me (below) if you're interested in discussing further. 6. I'm not intimately familiar with the system in question, but in general NGS offers greater "resolution" than other molecular approaches. And, as the existence of this initiative at CDC hints, having this resolution is particularly important for strain-typing and other public health functions. Ultimately, we think many of these benefits will also carry over in the form of better clinical (diagnostic) information and data collection. Happy to chat about this further if it's of interest. My email is nick@onecodex.com.