I’ve been avoiding focusing too much Oxford Nanopore over the past few years. Privately I do ask people smarter than me/”in the know” if they think that the technology is the real deal. The reason for my skepticism is that I remember people being hoodwinked by Pacific Biosciences in 2008. Part of the issue is that biologists want these technologies to deliver, so there’s a bias in terms of how they’re going to be received.
That being said I saw some Nanopore machines recently. I knew they were small. In fact, rationally I knew how small they were. But when they were just there on the counter, like large USB drives, it was hard to take it in. The new Illumina machines aren’t very large. They’re mini-fridge scale. But to see a sequencing machine which you might actually step on by mistake was a bit mind-blowing. It’s as if we’re going from 1970s mainframe technology, where it took up a whole room, to the smartphone era, where a computer fit in your back pocket.
I don’t know if Oxford Nanopore will succeed. But it seems obvious, viscerally so, that someone will, and that we’ll have small portable sequencers which are quite accurate and will generate long reads by 2020. That’s a revolution, but by then we’ll probably take it for granted. Then we can forget about the technology, and focus on the biology and what to do with all the data.
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