Hand-Held DNA Sequencer
March 13, 2018 | Terry Sharrer
It has been 20 years since the public and private efforts to sequence the human genome began as a race, and both the Department of Energy and Celera Corporation efforts relied on an automated sequencer that could determine 900,000 bases a day. The machine they used was the “ABI-Prism 3700,” roughly the size of a commercial washing machine. Celera had 300 of them running 24/7. This piece reports the same accomplishment—sequencing 3,098,794,149 bp—with a device that’s roughly the size of a smartphone, which doesn’t require PCR amplification. Click on the link to the Nature Biotechnology article which has the technical details of the Oxford Nanopore Sequencer. MORE
Image Credit: Oxford Nanopore