Tag Archive for 'Oxford nanopore'

Making sequencing simpler with nanopores

17/02/2012
Categories: Technology
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The Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference, one of the main go-to destinations for those who get excited by DNA sequencing technology, is currently going down in Florida. Sadly, no-one from GNZ could make it this year, but we are keeping up with the various announcements about new genomics tech as best we can. One that caught our attention was the announcement of a brand new sequencing machine from a company that has previously kept very quiet about its technology.

Oxford Nanopore, who we have written about before, today announced two new sequencing machines to come out this year. The announcement has caused quite a buzz amoungst, well, everyone. Nature, New Scientist, GenomeWeb, BioIT World and Forbes all have reported on it, and bloggers Nick Loman and Keith Robison have also had a chance to talk to some of the Oxford Nanopore peeps about their new toys.

A lot of the interest has come from the (very cool) MinION, a tiny, disposable USB-key sequencer (shown in the picture above) that can sequence about a billion base pairs of DNA, and cost around $500-$900 each. The applications of this are endless – the ability to pick up a bit of biological matter, mix it with a few chemicals, and read whatever DNA is in it, could help with diagnostics, epidemiology, ecology, forensics. It is also (though not quite) the price where hobbyists could consider having a play; perhaps in a few years plug-and-play DIY genetics could be a possibility.

Less immediately striking, but still just as interesting, is the GridION sequencing machine. This is the work-horse of the nanopore sequencing world, made for reading lots of DNA, and scaling up to massive sequencing centers. Obviously, many scientists are going to be very interested in many of the features (notably, the ability to read very long pieces of DNA, a trick that has previously been more-or-less impossible to do reliably). However, what will this announcement mean for those of us who are interested in personal genomics?

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Guest post by Clive Brown: the disruptive power of cheap DNA sequencing

06/06/2011
Categories: Guest Posts
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In advance of the Cheltenham Science Festival session on the race for the $1,000 genome this Wednesday, panel participant Clive Brown agreed to write a guest post on the importance of advances in genomic technology. Clive is Chief Technology Officer at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, where he leads the specification and design of the Company’s nanopore based sensing platform, including strand DNA/RNA sequencing and protein sensing applications, which we’ve written about previously here at Genomes Unzipped.

Incidentally, the other panel members will be Adam Rutherford, presenter of the excellent recent genetics documentary series The Gene Code, and Genomes Unzipped’s very own Caroline Wright, and the session will be chaired by Times Science Editor Mark Henderson – so if you’re anywhere near Cheltenham, you should definitely check it out.

When the final Human Genome Project publication was published in 2004, hundreds of scientists from 18 different institutions from the UK to the US, China and Japan authored the paper. The cost of this phenomenal collaborative project has been estimated at more than $3 billion from its initiation, a ‘moon-shot’ that was necessary to step onto the path of improving the process of obtaining and understanding genetic information. In 2004 the cost of sequencing a whole (haploid) human genome was still in the region of tens of millions of dollars. In 2008 this dropped through $1 million, in 2009 through $100k and in 2011 the cost is approaching $10k.

Many people have criticised the fact that the Human Genome Project did not in itself deliver a new era of personalised medicine, without realising that the project was just the first hurdle which facilitated major steps forward in the basic scientific understanding of genomics – for example, understanding the basic structure of the genome or mapping the variation between different peoples’ genomes. Importantly, the foundations were laid for understanding the very complex mechanisms behind how the genetic code relates to the expression of a protein and therefore the ‘phenotype’ – how those genetic differences are manifested whether it is a trait or disease-causing malfunction.
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Cluster Sequencing with Oxford Nanopore’s GridION System

28/01/2011
Categories: Technology
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More on nanopore sequencing this week. I mentioned in my Genetic Future post that the UK sequencing company Oxford Nanopore is somewhat of a dark horse, and an agreement with Illumina has required complete silence about their potential DNA sequencing machines. However, this wasn’t strictly true; Illumina has signed an agreement for the exonuclease sequencing technology, and on that we aren’t likely to hear anything until it is ready.

However, Oxford Nanopore still can, and does, talk about other aspects of their technology. And today, they have released information on their website on the GridION platform, which will be used to run all their nanopore technology (including DNA sequencing and protein analysis). In effect, these are details about the sequencing machine, but with no new specifics about the sequencing process itself.

Here are a few first impressions.

Sequencing in Clusters

The machines are small and low-cost; I expect they will cost the same or less than an Ion Torrent machine. Like the Ion Torrent, MiSeq and GS Junior, the Nanopore machines should be suitable to sit on the bench of a small lab, running small projects and with small budgets and floorspace.

However, this isn’t the full story. Each individual machine is rocking the VCR-machine-circa-1992 look, and the reason for this becomes clear when you see many of them together. The boxes are designed to fit together in standard computing cluster racks, and Oxford Nanopore refer to each of the individual machines as “nodes”. The nodes connect together via a standard network, and can talk to each other, as well as reporting data in real time through the network to other computers. When joined together like this, one machine can be designated as the control node, and during sequencing many nodes can be assigned to sequence the same sample.

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Sequencing DNA with Nanopores

24/01/2011
Categories: Technology
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As we have already mentioned, Daniel has recently moved his blog Genetic Future over to the Wired science blogging network. While Daniel is off flying around Europe introducing his newborn to mozzarella and skiing, I have written a guest post for Genetic Future entitled An Introduction to Nanopore Sequencing.

I have been meaning to write about nanopore sequencing for quite a while (if you don’t know what nanopore sequencing is at all, go read the post!). What prompted me to write this was a CGI video made by Oxford Nanopore that managed to sum up nicely some of the basic theory behind nanopore sequencing:

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