Yesterday, I plugged this guy into my laptop and sequenced a genome in 24 hours

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41 points·taubek··8 comments

Would these be useful in sequencing the plant/animal life around my home? I think it would be cool for there to be repos of local wildlife around their place. Although, I can't say I even know where to start in all that.

“The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed.” -William Gibson

thought this was about bio-reverse-engineering at first

I think it only costs $2000 - https://store.nanoporetech.com/minion.html which is pretty amazing

Which would enabling every police officer to do DNA matching by themselves in the field, in minutes, not days in some external lab. A breakthrough

I curious to hear more about your thought. Would it be that they take a suspect’s swab at the scene and then match against a database?

Technically it's been possible for a decade. Back then, it was kind of big news when people were using an earlier version of the device for sequencing in the field during the Ebola epidemic. Of course you still need some training to do it properly, and the field kits have a short shelf life.

Unfortunately, the flow cells themselves make the cost of running these regularly much higher. This is still an amazing improvement from the past few years and decades! I am clarifying that we're not "at spend $2k and you're good."

I believe Illumina is still more cost effective for whole genome sequencing, but Oxford Nanopore is perfect for batched plasmid sequencing. For example, Plasmidsaurus will sequence your plasmid DNA for $15 each, and email you the results overnight!

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