The highest throughput yet: PromethION breaks the 7 Terabase mark
The PromethION 48 (P48) achieved over 7 Terabases in a single experiment at Oxford Nanopore this week.
The 48 flow cells were run in parallel and basecalled in real time. This takes full advantage of software developments released earlier this year, enabling PromethION Beta, P24 and P48 flow cells to be run together, should a user choose to.
The P48 reached 7.3 Tb of data in 81 hours using the same flow cells as those currently being shipped to customers. It has deployed a new script being prepared for release in May which can further extended the lifetime of a flow cell.
Two samples were sequenced on these flow cells: the Utah genome (NIST RM8398) and Jewish Ashkenazi (NIST RM8391). Basecalling was carried out with the latest generation of Flip-flop basecallers.
This run is part of the internal effort to validate the new device in advance of shipping which will commence to early users in May and the next step will be to support our external users to replicate these results.
The PromethION is available to order in store:
- P24 for very high throughput. Internally 3.6 Tb of data has been achieved by running the systems 24 flow cells in parallel, with higher future capacity as we continue to improve all aspects of the technology.
- P48 for ultra-high throughput. As of this week 7.3 Tb has been achieved, also with higher future capacity.
The availability of the two PromethION formats (P24 & P48) means that there is an option suitable for all core labs/service providers, researchers sequencing larger genomes such as humans or plants, and those performing population-scale sequencing projects.
As we aim to disrupt the availability of sequencing technology, we have made PromethION highly accessible – researchers don’t need to pay capital for the device itself and flow cells are available to order in varying pack sizes which provide the user with a cost from $1700 - $625 – the latter of which is enabling human long read genomes to be commercially offered for under $1000.
