The 3rd generation is here: first details on the new Oxford Nanopore sequencing platforms

There was a great hype around the new technology proposed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). Sequencing using nanopores had been the center of attention in the past months as it was becoming clear that this new platform really had the power to make a revolution, taking NGS really to the 3rd generation. Quick, affordable and robust single molecule sequencing with extremely long reads was the promise and Oxford Nanopore did not disappoint!
They made their move on the stage of the AGBT conference with a talk and an official press release announcing the main specs of their new paltforms (GridION and the small MinION). Now everybody is talking about nanopore sequencing, its potential and the issues related to this new amazing technology. A number of interesting posts have been published by the bloggers: Keith Robinson had the opportunity to talk directly with ONT guys and made a detailed commentary; CoreGenomics blog has a good summary of the main innovations introduced by ONT; Bio-IT World released an interesting interview with Oxford Nanopore CTO Clive Brown and you can find lot more on the others blogs we follow.
This are the main characteristics of the new platforms that make everybody say "WOW!":

- long reads: at least 10kb, up to 40kb, with a 4% error;

- high accuracy: ONT stated that at the time of release they will reach 99% accuracy in base calling;

- fast sequencing: GridION machine will be able to read sequences at roughly 600 million base pairs per second, about 14Gbp a day or a high coverage (30x) human genome in just under 6 days;

- low costs: even if the exact costs are not available yet, they will be around $2000 for a single human genome, with the promise to quickly drop to $1000. It seems that one could choose between different configurations of the machine: one will costs more at the beginning but will have low running expenses, the other will have a small price (even close to zero) then you will spend in consumable when you decide to sequence;

- quick sample preparation: the new single molecule technology will require very limited sample preparation. Simply extract the DNA, maybe perform a partial fragmentation, and you are ready to load and run the machine. This will eliminate the long and expensive library preparation steps that affect all other platforms.

Beyond the technical specs there are a number of amazing facts around the new Nanopore technology, among them the possibility to read nucleotide modifications, thus creating space for a variety of new experimental approaches.

The MinION machine is really surprising, emboding the concept of Personal Genomics. It is a device with a 1Gb sequencing capability dressed as an USB pen-drive, and also working as simply as one of them, as Oxford Nanopore showed. You can buy one, load your sample, attach the MinION to an USB port and have the sequence on your laptop!

The GridION big brother is also amazing: a single instrument, a node, operates with a single-use cartridge that contains the necessary reagents to perform an experiment; multiple nodes can be aggregated together into larger co-operating units or clusters, communicating with each other (a 20 nodes system could deliver an entire human genome in 15 minutes); a user can run one or more nodes for minutes or days according to how much data is needed to complete the experiment.

Are you ready for the 3rd generation in genomic sequencing?