While the next-generation sequencing world ponders the existence of Oxford Nanopore's sequencers, James Hadfield writes on his blog that he caught sight of a sequencing chip for the instrument recently.
On his CoreGenomics blog, Hadfield says that while at the Science Museum in London this past weekend, he was "amazed" to see the chip on display in the "Who Am I" gallery. Next to the chip is a description of the chip that reads, "Oxford Nanopore chip. Tiny pores 10,000 times smaller than a human hair sit in microscopic holes covering the surface of this speedy chip. DNA is read electronically as it zips through each pore, generating DNA sequence data."
Hadfield, who runs the genomics core facility at Cambridge Research Institute, also notes that the chip is next to a Life Technologies SOLiD sequencer. "Don't read [too] much into it being next to a technology that is already obsolete!" he says.
Oxford Nanopore, of course, sent a shiver through last year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting when it announced two nanopore strand sequencing systems, GridIon and MinIon, that the UK company said would deliver very long reads with high speed and accuracy, as Daily Scan's sister publication In Sequence reported at the time.
Since then, however, the company has been relatively quiet and at this year's AGBT meeting, the firm was a phantom, opting not to provide an update on the technology, In Sequence said.