Oxford Nanopore develops nanopore sequencer for connecting smartphones
Release date: 2016-06-02
Oxford Nanopore Technologies revealed that it is developing a nanopore sensor for smartphones for DNA sequencing and other applications. The company also introduced other new products in research and development. In addition, the company established a branch called Genome Foundry, focusing on the application of synthetic biology.
Developed a nanopore instrument SmidgIon for connecting smartphones
Clive Brown, the company's chief technology officer, revealed that the new nanopore instrument, called SmidgIon, is in the early stages of development and is expected to be available by the end of 2017. The product will also use core nanopore sensing technology for MinIon and PromethIon instruments, but the instrument will be smaller than MinIon, with 256 channels per flow cell that can be connected to a smartphone or other low-power instrument. For sensing DNA, RNA or protein.
According to the company, SmidgIon can be used in a wider range of areas, including pathogen monitoring in disease outbreaks, analysis of environmental samples or agricultural samples, and real-time species identification of wildlife or wood.
Other products under development
Brown, another product in the early stages of development, is called Project Zumbador, which combines nucleic acid extraction and library preparation of biological samples into one device and will be released in the third quarter.
The company is also developing kits for direct RNA sequencing on MinIon and PromethIon, which are expected to be available to developers in the next few months. According to the company, the product uses adapters and motor proteins to control RNA translocation and direct RNA into the nanopore. Oxford has used this method to sequence RNA from human rhinoviruses and has indicated that direct RNA sequencing can detect methylation modifications on RNA.
Another product, the VolTrax, is a sample preparation instrument that will be available in advance this fall to customers currently using the Oxford nanopore sequencing platform. According to the company, the first Volrax instrument will be attached to a small USB instrument and attached to the MioIon or PromethIon instrument.
Oxford Nanopore also plans to implement the local use of the MinKonw platform base recognition software shortly.
The first PromethIon has recently shipped
Brown said that the first PromethIon has been shipped to customers recently. He also showed some internal data of the platform, using a total of 48 flow cells, each containing 3000 channels. Using R9 reagent, each nanopore was sequenced 250 bases per second, and the accuracy and pore utilization were consistent with MinIon. The current performance of the system is 6.2 Tb of data generated in 48 hours of operation and will be further increased to 12.4 Tb in the future. According to Brown's report, the company is currently debugging software to control base real-time identification of large data sets, optimize chip surface chemistries and production processes, and develop a fast base recognition program.
All new nanopores R9
In addition, Brown said that Oxford Nanopore no longer sells R7 nanopore flow cells, and has now been replaced by R9 nanopore flow cells, R9, CsgG, recently licensed by the VIB Institute of Belgium and the University College of London. Brown added that the new flow cell also incorporates a robust membrane and a newer helicase motor protein. The company's longest read length of 500 kb using the new flow cell sequencing is currently focused on improving flux and homopolymer recognition.
The company pointed out in a statement that the R9 system has a higher accuracy, especially for 1D reads, which read only one strand of DNA. The new base recognition software is different from the previous hidden Markov model, which is based on the neural network model, which further improves the accuracy. When the R9 flowcell is sequenced, each nanopore is sequenced at 250 bases per second, while the R7 model measures up to 70 bases per second. Therefore, the company said that MinIon will produce more data after switching to the R9 flow cell. Brown said that the accuracy of 1D reads is currently 90% and the accuracy of 2Dreads is 95%.
In conjunction with the R9 flow cell, the company is introducing a rapid sequencing kit. It takes only 10 minutes to build the library with this kit, and the consumables used are less than before, and the data analysis is performed immediately after the start of MinIon operation. The company statement said that many early customers are testing this fast-sequencing kit, "it will soon be available in the market."
Established a branch company Genome Foundry
Brown finally mentioned Genome Foundry, a new subsidiary of Oxford Nanopore, which aims to develop a "MinIon for Synthetic Biology" using proprietary, non-phosphoramidite DNA synthesis reagents. The company's goal is to develop long-chain DNA molecules using instruments similar to VolTrax.
Source: Sequencing China
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