Mariana Corrales Orozco from EAFIT University in Colombia spoke at London Calling 2023 about “Revolutionizing biodiversity research: Oxford Nanopore sequencing for the rapid and accurate identification of endangered species.” They started with heat maps depicting species diversity and the challenges of identifying new species. Typically, an expert taxonomist examines a sample. This approach requires sacrificing the animal. Now, different primer sets are used to sequence mitochondrial and reference gene sequences. To maximize the probability of identification, Corrales Orozco and colleagues used the mitochondrial DNA and MinION devices. The research team used shotgun sequencing. Flye and other software to analyze sequences. Rebaler was used too, and mt genomes were assembled. Species identification was performed from raw reads, and through this pipeline, 21 samples were identified. Rapid species identification could be performed with a cloud-based pipeline. The results were applied to optimize the procedure and obtain data, even in cases with limited knowledge about the sample. Assembled mitogenomes can be used to further enrich the databases and improve the pipeline.
