In Brief: Oxford Nanopore updates at the Nanopore Community meeting in New York

It has been a busy week in New York. Presentations will be released soon, but in the meantime you can review updates by following #nanoporeconf on social media or the updates here on the news page. In the meantime, we have collated some of the key notes made by Oxford Nanopore presenters at the conference:

Gordon Sanghera, CEO, opened the conference with a reminder of the performance evolution of the MinION. Introduction of the R9 nanopore gave the biggest leap in performance.

• Clive Brown introduced a pipeline product that will introduce bead beating directly to the MinION, allowing rapid workflows from original samples
• 1D squared.  Clive Brown spoke about a new way of sequencing both strands of DNA with no hairpin, working at 450 bases per second
• Clive Brown noted that Oxford Nanopore is now working on a “Transducer” basecaller – it can predict state-to-state changes and doesn’t limit homopolymer base calls

• Dan Turner spoke about long reads, and opening up ultra long reads to all MinION users by adjusting some existing scripts.
• Dan Turner noted that there is now a library prep kit for most experiments, but if this is getting confusing then there is the protocol selector (login to the community
• Dan Turner’s applications team have shown very rapid turnaround of complete end to end workflows, for example Extraction, library prep and species ID in under 20 minutes by whole genome sequencing or Extraction, library prep and species ID in under 40 minutes by PCR and rapid amplicon kit – both summarised at this new poster
• Dan Turner introduced a new poster with updated proof of Direct RNA sequencing  - first kits will be supplied to early users in the coming weeks
• Dan Turner noted that VolTRAX, being shipped now to early users, will provide automated versions of 1D transposase prep and  1D/2D ligation preps poster:

• Andy Heron presented work that is developing CRISPR/Cas9 probe panels, designed to allow scientists to sequence only their targets of interest
• MinION Dx (“Flongle):  Gordon Sanghera announced that in 2017 we will be pursuing regulatory approval of the Flongle, or Flow Cell Dongle. This variation of the MinION design allows for a low cost consumable to be integrated with a MinION Flow Cell, and is well suited to people needing frequent, low cost DNA analyses.

MinION Dx ("Flongle):