Line Them Up

At Genomes Unzipped, Luke Jostins gives his thoughts on Oxford Nanopore's GridION platform, which is the basis for all of the company's DNA, protein, and small molecule analysis applications. Jostins says that the machines appear to be bench top-friendly, but also scalable. "The boxes are designed to fit together in standard computing cluster racks, and … connect together via a standard network," he says. Jostins also makes an estimate of what the throughput of a machine might be. With some assumptions, he calculates that "a single machine would be running about 500 Mbp/hour; this is a 30X genome in a week." Jostins adds that "nanopore technology is making solid advances towards working machines, and that these machines could be game-changers."