I am a great fan of DNA pooling (mainly for cost reasons). During our recent experiments we have lost the identity of a single DNA source by pooling. Then we found that the source DNA may be tagged with a unique oligo allowing the assembler to reconstruct the DNA source from the pool. He comes another variation of The Sequencing Game
The pooling of DNA sequencing samples is not new, but current protocols rely on bar coding each sample with a short oligonucleotide, which is then used to associate a read to the correct sample. This approach is laborious, however, as a unique tag has to be created for each sample. The new method creates pools of samples, and then associates a bar code to each pool, rather than to each individual sequence.