PromethION in the wild 2: data yield continues to climb

PromethION, Oxford Nanopore’s highest throughput sequencing device, became commercially available after an early access phase, in May 2018. Since then users have been ramping up their efforts to set new records for high yield nanopore sequencing.

PromethION is designed to run up to 48 flow cells concurrently or individually. Each PromethION flow cell can run up to 3,000 nanopore channels simultaneously, giving them approximately six times the sequencing capacity of a MinION or GridION flow cell. With current yields, a PromethION therefore has the capacity to deliver terabases of long-read sequence data in real time.

Now, with PromethIONs in place at a wide range of sites across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, in-field results continue to increase. June saw the first achievement of over 100 Gb from a single PromethION flow cell from the Albertsen lab at the University of Aalborg.  Crop specialist Keygene achieved 106Gb of sequence data with  N50 > 30kb and nearby in the Netherlands there have been more record-breaking runs from University Medical Center Utrecht,  reaching 128 Gb. Raising the bar even higher, the University of Birmingham last week demonstrated over 130 Gb of data from their first PromethION flow cell.

All Oxford Nanopore devices are available without a capital commitment, with consumables being priced according to the volume committed to. PromethION Flow Cells are priced between $625 and $2,000 depending on the bundle, demonstrating the pathway to the sub-$1,000, nanopore-only human genome described in Clive Brown’s February webcast . PromethION can also be used for service provision, as highlighted by this week’s announcement of a new large-scale PromethION -based service in China.

If you are interested in using nanopore technology at scale and on-demand, whether for large samples or multiple small samples, please review our GridION and PromethION pages, or get in touch. Nanopore sequencing is also available from our certified service providers across the globe.