SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I am part of an international team of researchers who have been exploring the capabilities of the MinION Sequencer, the MinION Analysis and Reference Consortium (MARC). Our first paper on this exploration has just been published in f1000 Research. Five separate labs carried out four sequencing runs each of the same strain of E. coli, and a few more labs helped to analyse the results. If you're interested in seeing what this technology is capable of (or at least, what it was capable of about 6 months ago), check out the paper here, or download the data here.
The Oxford Nanopore MinION is a small DNA sequencer that plugs into the USB port of a laptop and sequences DNA by measuring changes in an electric current as the sequence is passed through one of 4096 pores in the sequencing device. These electrical signals are combined into events that describe the movement of a single base, and the events are then base-called to generate DNA sequences.
The MinION sequencer is almost entirely electronic, stripping away everything that makes existing DNA sequencing technologies big, heavy, slow and expensive. This has meant that the MinION is uniquely able to be used in remote areas where other sequencers just can't reach: sequencing Ebola on-site in Africa, sequencing the DNA of small frogs in the Amazon rainforest, and more recently sequencing DNA in NASA's vomit comet.
Previously: The MinION - Genome Sequencing in a Handheld Device
(Score: 3, Informative) by gringer on Monday October 19 2015, @09:12PM
Medium term for the MinION is six months. This technology will be either everywhere or nowhere in 5 years.
smaller, cheaper, quicker, more accurate
All of the above, even just based on what we were told (and what I've seen) at London Calling in May. These are 1-2 year visions, not 5-year visions:
What are the brick walls that you don't think you'll get past?
There's not much, but I can come up with a few things if I stretch myself:
The technology is based around electrical sensing. That makes it fast and small, but with advances in sub-diffraction imaging I can see a ghost of the potential for single molecule optical sequencing. I don't expect that the nanopore technology will be able to do that.
ONT want to bring in time-based sequencing, which also introduces the idea that ONT can prevent you from sequencing via digital restrictions management. I don't think they're open enough that they would let people do whatever they wanted with the device.
People are very resistant to changes brought about by disruptive technologies, and there's a lot of money sunk into current-generation sequencing technology. I expect that this technology is more likely to change DNA sequencing in places where it's not done already.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday October 19 2015, @10:01PM
6 months? 6 months? I can't even get ambiguous icons in a GUI changed in 6 months!
As someone with a bit of a background in security, ONT needs to know that DRM (nicely expanded - thanks!) will probably be useless. Every extra digit of security multiplies the cost by 10, you'll never get to 100.000% secure DRM. Hackers, whilst they're still alive and kicking, will hack.
The being resistant to change aspect is an interesting one. There is a saying that if you want to get a manned spacecraft off to alien planets, the best way of getting there quicker is to leave later, as the improvements in technology will be more significant than simply starting earlier. This seems similar - those who are deeply invested into previous generations of technology because they got into it earlier might even end up behind.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves