A world of opportunities with nanopore sequencing
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Genomics
- Keywords
- nanopore, sequencing, bioinformatics, technology, diagnostics, assembly
- Copyright
- © 2017 Leggett et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. A world of opportunities with nanopore sequencing. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3090v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3090v2
Abstract
Oxford Nanopore Technologies' MinION sequencer was launched in pre-release form in 2014 and represents an exciting new sequencing paradigm. The device offers multi-kilobase reads and a streamed mode of operation that allows processing of reads as they are generated. Crucially, it is an extremely compact device that is powered from the USB port of a laptop computer, enabling it to be taken out of the lab and facilitating previously impossible in-field sequencing experiments to be contemplated. Many of the initial publications concerning the platform focussed on provision of tools to access and analyse the new sequence formats and then demonstrating the assembly of microbial genomes. More recently, as throughput and accuracy have increased, it has been possible to consider work involving more complex genomes and metagenomes. With the release of the high throughput GridION X5 and PromethION platforms the sequencing of large genomes will become more cost efficient, and enable the leveraging of extremely long (>100kb) reads for resolution of complex genomic structures. This review provides a brief overview of nanopore sequencing technology, describes the growing range of nanopore bioinformatics tools and highlights some of the most influential publications that have emerged over the last two years. Finally, we look to the future and the potential the platform has to disrupt work in human, microbiome and plant genomics.
Author Comment
An updated and peer reviewed version of this paper is now published in the Journal of Experimental Botany: https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jxb/erx289/4093050/A-world-of-opportunities-with-nanopore-sequencing