Monday, February 23, 2009

Nanotech based DNA sequencing to lower costs

In the new issue of Nature, Oxford Nanopore describes their new DNA sequencing technology. It doesn't require fluorescent labeling, and achieves 99.8% accuracy. They say that this technology 'could' reduce costs and speed up sequencing (that is probably dependent on how the manufacturing details work out). They claim 50 base pair per second per pore, but I haven't yet seen what they estimate maximum read length would be, or how many pores per chip they expect to make. No word yet on time to market.

You can check out the corporate web site at http://nanoporetech.com/. They are pushing this technology as a possible solution to the personal genomes projects that have been springing up recently.

The technology is a combination of biochemical components and nanotechnology. You can find a nice overview animation at YouTube.



The full animation with no voice over:


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