London Calling 2023: Pathogen and species identification using a mobile suitcase laboratory

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said “We only see what we know”; however, sequencing has taught us to start seeing what we did not see before. This can be achieved by applying various methods to analyse the same sets of sequence data. In my presentation, I will discuss the development of the mobile suitcase lab to operate Oxford Nanopore sequencing in low-resource settings in India, Bangladesh, Sudan, Uganda, Egypt, and Senegal. The mobile setup was used for the rapid identification of infectious agents (pathogen ID) from blood (septicaemia) and faecal (diarrheal diseases) samples. To tackle the infectivity of vectors, pathogen ID and the identification of human or animal species in blood meals of mosquito (species ID) were developed. A reverse purification extraction protocol, Oxford Nanopore sequencing, and offline BLAST facilitated the whole procedure in a mobile suitcase lab in less than 150 minutes.