Not too far away from Gattaca

I once said jokingly to my brother that by 2020 we would be pretty close to being able to sequence a whole human genome the way they do it in the 1997 film Gattaca. Today with the press release from Oxford Nanopore it looks like we are one step closer. The most striking piece of kit is the cute MinIon, a USB stick you plug into your laptop and off you go sequencing. The sequencing approach and the concept of sequencing until you have found what you are looking for, is completely different to previous sequencing technologies. Forget about next-generation sequencing, this is revolutionary sequencing.
There's already a lot of coverage about Oxford nanopores press release and i found Nick Loman's blog posts on the new technology interesting.


"Run Until": DNA sequencing informatics on the GridION and MinION systems from Oxford Nanopore on Vimeo.