DNA strand sequencing can now be done at home and in the office, with electronic sequencers having been miniaturised to the size of a USB memory stick.
Oxford Nanopore recently introduced its scalable electronic GridION sequencing platform, and a miniaturised version of the technology called MinION. The company is now looking to commercialise GridION and MinION directly to customers within this year.
The technology behind the platform utilises an array of proprietary protein nanopores embedded in a polymer membrane to deliver ultra long read length single molecule sequence data, real time sequencing result, and high throughput, at competitive accuracy.
Oxford Nanopore's GridION system consists of scalable instruments (nodes) used with consumable cartridges that contain proprietary array chips for multi-nanopore sensing. Each GridION node and cartridge is initially designed to deliver tens of Gb of sequence data every 24 hours, and the sequencing can be run for minutes or days.
The company says it will price its systems to be competitive with other leading sequencing systems. Costs will be lowered with future development to the technology, in particular with increases in nanopore processing speed and higher density electronic sensor chips.
The MinION is a disposable and portable DNA sequencing device the size of a USB memory stick. Single units are expected to retail at less than US$900, which is a relatively low cost in the DNA sequencing sector, and apparently a disposable amount of money.
While the focus of Oxford Nanopore is on biotechnology, CEO Dr Gordon Sanghera holds that it is also an electronics company, focused on the development of a high-throughput electronics platform capable of designing and screening a large number of new candidate nanopores and enzymes.