There is lot's of room for improvement though. All of the commercial nanopore tech is based on biological nanopores, which have the advantage of having very straight-forward to fabricate. But they are limited to the ionic current signal, which is very noisy and weak. Once these companies start introducing solid-state devices though, things will begin to get very interesting as alternative signal transduction mechanisms come into play.
It seems like a fun problem in information theory. Can you point us to some articles or papers about current approaches to solving it?
People may be specifically interested in the first and second talks with the corollary of both being likely biased towards the MinIon:
- 1st is by Clive Brown (ONP CTO) and discusses the MinIon platform, background to the Nanopore technology, analysis platforms and the future PromethIon expansions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ut...
- 2nd has Nick Loman (one of the MAP researchers but admitted 'fanboy') discussing the performance on the MinIon in his lab in 'real world' conditions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ut...
Incredible work, the stamina on display is extremely impressive and I hope they and their backers will reap the rewards from all the hard work very many times over.
To put in laymans terms what this thing is: it's a tape-playback machine for DNA.
Now they need to fix the bugs (hard, but probably not nearly as hard as getting to this stage in the first place).
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21615029-...
"One of these, Genia, is commercialising a process called nanopore sequencing that Dr Church first devised in 1988. Distinct polymer tags are attached to each of the four nucleotides poised to contribute to a single molecule of replicating DNA. As they react, the tags are released near a protein layer full of tiny holes called nanopores. Each tag blocks the flow of electrical ions across the layer in a different way. Because it relies on electronics rather than optics, nanopore sequencing promises faster, cheaper sequencing. Dr Church holds up a fingernail-sized chip containing 128,000 nanopores that he reckons will bring the cost of sequencing down to $100. In June, Genia was acquired by Roche, a Swiss pharmaceuticals giant."
Having said that, for cancer genomics, the vast majority of archival tumour tissue in the world is stored in a way that auto-fragments the DNA, so being able to do long reads won't actually help...
It's a great achievement and I'm hopeful, but the accuracy needs to go up before it competes with current standard.
Like that is not even a blip in a normal research budget for equipment.
Also I think the method you are describing is their other sequencing approach - this one, as far as I know, passes an intact strand through each pore and examines the electrical conductivity of overlapping 6 base pair sequences.
