A 2.3M bp Genome Read From a Nanopore

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Did it contain a message from the designer, perhaps a passage from the bible?

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I will definitely have to read up on this methodology. In my own experience working with DNA is that it is a very fragile molecule. Standard purification methods usually result in 20-30 kb fragments which makes we curious as to how they keep the molecule intact.

This also seems to open up sequencing of regions that current methodologies have difficulty with, namely repeat regions. Pretty cool stuff!!

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The script for the next Star Wars movie??? :slight_smile:

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For those who are interested, there is a decent overview at Nature Biotechnology:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4125

They are using a helicase to unwind and separate the DNA strands. Sequencing is accomplished by measuring changes in electrical charge as the helicase pushes the DNA strand through a nanopore in a membrane. Since it can read millions of bases at a time it doesn’t have the disadvantage of trying to reconstruct chunks of sequence with multiple repeats. The downside is that it isn’t nearly as accurate as other methods.

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