After Long Delays, Breakthrough Nanopore Sequencer Finally in Labs

Not having to deal with all the complexities of analysing short read sequence data would be fantastic, I hope they get the accuracy a bit better. At the moment current sequencing technologies are great at detecting mutations but struggle with changes in gene number, gene fusions and large structural variation at the kilobase or more scale. Hopefully long read tech will open up this aspect of genomic information to greater scrutiny.

Having said that, for cancer genomics, the vast majority of archival tumour tissue in the world is stored in a way that auto-fragments the DNA, so being able to do long reads won't actually help...

At $1000 a machine, if they can get the accuracy up these things are going to be everywhere. There'll be absolutely no reason for any lab tangentially related to DNA not to have one.

Like that is not even a blip in a normal research budget for equipment.

There was recently an online mini-conference mostly about the MinIon (involving the CTO of Oxford Nanopore and a few of the researchers involved in the MinIon Access Program).

People may be specifically interested in the first and second talks with the corollary of both being likely biased towards the MinIon:

- 1st is by Clive Brown (ONP CTO) and discusses the MinIon platform, background to the Nanopore technology, analysis platforms and the future PromethIon expansions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ut...

- 2nd has Nick Loman (one of the MAP researchers but admitted 'fanboy') discussing the performance on the MinIon in his lab in 'real world' conditions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ut...

How do they get the DNA unwound and free from tangles? Isn't it normally wrapped around his tones ?

Researcher working on a different approach to nanopore sequencing here. The Minion is really interesting technology, but early reports basically indicate that it's essentially useless in it's current form. One of the issues is that the basecalling algorithm relies on a noisy, two bit signal. Apparently it works okay on trained sequences, like lambda DNA (that's where the 60-85% accuracy comes from). But when used to sequence untrained DNA, the accuracy drops off significantly (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1755-0998.12324/a...).

There is lot's of room for improvement though. All of the commercial nanopore tech is based on biological nanopores, which have the advantage of having very straight-forward to fabricate. But they are limited to the ionic current signal, which is very noisy and weak. Once these companies start introducing solid-state devices though, things will begin to get very interesting as alternative signal transduction mechanisms come into play.