Questions associated with the generation or analysis of data from sequencer MinION. For questions about long reads (e.g. including PacBio), use `long-reads` instead. For questions that are more generally about nanopore devices (e.g. including PromethION), use `nanopore` instead.
minion -- The Oxford Nanopore MinION
A small, portable sequencer that uses electrical current flowing through small molecules (e.g. DNA nucleotides) to determine the underlying sequence.
What questions should have this tag?
Anything that is associated with the generation or analysis of data from the MinION, e.g. long-read FASTQ files, raw signal data, nanopore sample prep QC. If questions are not specific to the MinION (e.g. also applicable to PromethION), then the nanopore tag should be used.
Brief Introduction
The MinION's flow cell is comprised of 2048 wells containing a membrane perforated by nanopores. Ligated with a molecular motor, a single stranded DNA molecule passes through the pore, altering the recorded current. After the electronic sequencing is carried out, a software basecalling algorithm transforms the current trace into a modelled DNA sequence.
The advantages of the MinION are rapid library preparation, portability (Walter et al., 2016; Castro-Wallace et al., 2016), long molecule sequencing (Urban et al., 2015), and sequencing of non-model modifications of the DNA strand (Simpson et al., 2017). With the recent improvement in the chemistry of the MinION, Oxford Nanopore has overcome the majority of issues associated with low yield and high error rates that have limited the range of its application. The MinION sequencing device has now been successfully applied to sequence genomes of a wide range of sizes, from bacterial and viral genomes (Deschamps et al., 2016; Quick et al., 2017), amplicon sequencing like bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing (Benitez-paez et al., 2016), and more recently a human genome (Jain et al., 2017). The MinION has also been used for cDNA sequencing (Hargreaves et al., 2015), for detecting DNA methylation patterns without chemical treatment (Simpson et al., 2017; Rand et al., 2017), and for direct RNA sequencing with detection of modified 16S rRNA nucleotides (Smith et al., 2017).
[CC-by-4.0 text source by White et al., 2017 here]
Important links for learning more
- Summary of nanopore DNA sequencing (official ONT website)
- F1000 Research Nanopore Analysis gateway
