"My Twitter feed just exploded," Matthew Herper says. "No one is talking about much else right now," the Broad Institute's Chad Nusbaum tells Forbes. "This is the megaton sequencing announcement we've been waiting for," Nick Loman writes at Pathogens: Genes and Genomes.
We are, of course, referring to Oxford Nanopore's announcement of two new DNA strand-sequencing systems at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting held on Marco Island, Fla., last week. (Our sister publication In Sequence has more on the GridIon and MinIon.)
In addition to sending shockwaves across the blogs and on Twitter — "ILMN [Illumina] cheers storing genomes on a USB stick while Oxford Nanopore was showing sequencing genomes with a USB stick," @rob_carlson writes, while @GenomeBiology says "Oxford Nanopore had everyone talking at lunch. Is the MinIon going to be the next-next-gen? Wow," and @Copenhagenomics calls the new technology "a potential game changer" — Nanopore's announcements shook up the stock market, presumably causing the declines observed in some sequencing companies' share values Friday afternoon. (GenomeWeb Daily News breaks those declines down.)
"Too many amazing @nanopore tweets to retweet them all," Loman says. Daily Scan couldn't agree more.