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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 Tuesday October 20 2015, @03:33AM
Will Oxford Nanopore Technologies be able to move into a bigger/alternate domain, like transcriptome sequencing?
Yes, definitely. One of the most interesting approaches in that regard is direct sequencing from RNA [nanoporetech.com]. No other sequencer can do that, because all other sequencers rely on sequencing by synthesis. Sequencing output is not high enough at the moment for whole-transcriptome eukaryotic sequencing, but it should be there in a few months.
As a side-note, you can get considerable benefit from long-read sequencing of transcripts because you can pick up entire isoforms in a single read.
You mentioned a cheap cost for 1 billion base pairs. Does MinION achieve $100/$1000 genome sequencing when all costs are counted?
That depends on the genome. Viruses can be done already for under $1000! But more seriously, a human genome for $100 is probably an achievable target for the PromethION sequencer, but the MinION is not currently capable of doing that. With fast-mode and MkII MinION sequencers, there's a chance the marginal cost will get below $100 for whole-genome sequencing.
What's going on in genomics?
It's getting cheap and fast. Even with a few hundred million Illumina reads, it's possible to map a few RNASeq samples on a laptop and still have time left over for lunch. As the software becomes more efficient, new classes of people are introduced to genetics and bioinformatic analysis, which leads to further optimisations as other people realise what can be done.
Have you heard of this?
No, but it looks interesting, more for mapping than for actual sequencing.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]