I just ran a couple of flowcells last week. I've ran 8 total so far now. My impression is that it can be very inconsistent depending on the quality of the flowcell that they send you and your DNA prep. Great for smallish genomes (bacteria), not enough throughput/quality for large eukaryotic genomes (1gb+) unless you got money to burn.
It’s also comparatively expensive compared to other platforms (you can get a full human genome sequenced at high coverage for between 1000 and 3000 USD). The error rate is stupidly high (somewhere between 10 and 20%) compared to Illumina or Ion Torrent who give error rates far less than 1%. It can give very long reads, which are useful in some niche applications. But it’s been massively over-hyped (and over capitaliz…
This is not a "full" human genome, but a collection of 150bp fragments that can be realigned to an existing human genome. You cannot take this and infer the whole diploid genome of the individual. There is a huge amount that will be missed, and all of our current knowledge is based on this gappy picture of what's going on in single genomes and human populations.
> It can give very long reads, which are useful in some niche applications. But it’s been massively over-hyped (and over capitalized).
I think you're dismissing the technology out of hand because of biases derived from much more limited short-read technology that only allows us to reliably see small variants Without these long reads we can't see structural variation (SVs). There is an increasing amount of evidence that much of adaptive variation is driven by these kinds of variants. If you want recent evidence, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0010-y. There has long been evidence that there are huge copy number variations in humans, but these are still not evaluated reliably: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/641.
We should be open to the possibility that our observational techniques are limiting our understanding how how genomes work. This has consistently occurred in the history of every observationally-driven science.
It's amusing to me that people assume that SVs are "niche" when even the limited surveys of genomes we've been able to do with short reads show that roughly an equal number of base pairs in the human population vary due to small variants like SNPs and indels and big ones like deletions, insertions, and large scale copy number variation: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/641