A Lego look-alike and a chemist’s wine pastime

Illumina’s illusion Many of those attending the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Barcelona this September walked right past another seemingly typical Illumina booth. The company showcased the top-of-the-line fridge-size NovaSeq X sequencer , complete with a touch screen, a keyboard, and removable flow cells that attendees could stop by and mess with as they made their way across the exposition floor. The catch was that it wasn’t a real sequencer. “We’ve had to tell people that it’s made from Lego,” says Kristina Coulman-Cook, senior marketing programs manager at Illumina, of the promotional exhibition piece. Once the sculpture’s doors open, the illusion disappears: viewers inspect the reagent containers and find the characteristic Lego studs dotting their surfaces. Coulman-Cook tells Newscripts that the model has a false bottom that allows the whole assembly to be loaded onto a pallet truck and hauled from event to event. “It is still quite