Oxford Nanopore sequencing

The TGC recently purchased the new MinION instrument from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, employing the fourth-generation DNA sequencing technology. MinION is the only portable real-time device for DNA and RNA sequencing. Ultra-long read lengths are possible (hundreds of kb) as you can choose your fragment length. Nanopore sequencing also offers, for the first time, direct RNA sequencing, as well as PCR or PCR-free cDNA sequencing.

Minion, the instrument

The MinION offers advantages in all areas of research, such as microbiology, environmental research, microbiome, human genetics, cancer research, plant and animal research and more. Specifically, the ultra-long read lengths allow for special applications not possible in other sequencing technologies. For example, in human genetics, it enables full characterization of structural variation, repetitive regions, haplotype phasing, RNA splice variants, isoforms and fusion transcripts. In microbiology complete bacterial, fungal and viral genomes can be sequenced with the MinION sequencer; identifying and characterizing microbes from environmental or single organism samples.