Nanopore Community Meeting 23 Tech Update

Platform improvements provide another step in DNA/RNA sequencing performance to drive scientific research, as well as a springboard into clinical and applied markets seeking richer data, fast turnaround and accessible and affordable sequencing technology.

Oxford Nanopore announced a significant jump in platform performance to enable further scientific discovery in addition to a springboard to clinical markets, as part of a broader technology update at the Nanopore Community Meeting in Houston.

Oxford Nanopore SVP Product and Programme Management Rosemary Sinclair Dokos and SVP R&D Biologics Lakmal Jayasinghe gave the update to a crowd of more than 200 life science and translational researchers. They detailed breakthrough performance in DNA/RNA nanopore sequencing, including new improvements in DNA sequencing accuracy – reaching a record of Q28 (99.8 %) in median simplex single molecule accuracy – powered by machine learning-guided enzyme engineering and improved models. The longest Q30 (99.9 %) read in the dataset was 1.1 Megabases. The team also detailed a novel method to overcome errors in homopolymer regions that, when combined with other platform updates, pushed human consensus accuracy up to Q50 and indel f1 accuracy to 99%.

Additional platform updates included significant improvements in direct RNA sequencing to support the emergence of RNA-based therapies as well as numerous research areas of RNA biology, including m6A modified base calling.

As Oxford Nanopore continues to expand its user community in clinical and industrial applied markets, the team also shared the latest on its locked down Q-line and announced TurBOT beta access to deliver optimised sample-to-result product, strengthening its collaboration with Tecan.

Watch the tech talk below for more information on Oxford Nanopore’s technology pathway to address these current and future needs.