Oxford Nanopore unveils data from portable genome sequencer
Date: 17.2.2014
A good first shot, but not a game-changer, yet. That seems to be the consensus among scientists after the first public release today of data produced by the MinION, an advanced and much-anticipated DNA sequencing device developed by Oxford Nanopore in the UK.
The MinION aims to be the first commercially available sequencer that uses nanopore technology, which has been in development for nearly two decades. The approach identifies bases of DNA by measuring the changes in electrical conductivity they generated as they pass through a biological pore. Oxford claims that its nanopore machines will be faster and cheaper than existing sequencing technologies, and will allow scientists to analyse regions of the genome that cannot be amplied.
The MinION is not yet for sale. But David Jaffe, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used data produced by the device and provided by Oxford to aid in the assembly of two bacterial genomes — those of Escherichia coli and a bacterium from the genus Scardovia that is found in the human mouth. He presented his results today at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Marco Island, Florida.
“It’s kind of a cute device,” Jaffe says of the MinION, which is roughly the size and shape of a pack of gum. “It has pretty lights and a fan that hums pleasantly, and plugs into a USB drive.” But his technical review is mixed.
