Tonight I watched Dan Fordham, Director of Strategic Product Management EMEA at Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) speak at London Calling 2023 about. Fordham is the lead for the Org.one project in which ONT tries to address the global biodiversity crisis. ORG.one offers free consumables and kits to users sequencing critically endangered organisms. One of the requirements is to update data within six weeks of sequencing. They have put in place a Slack channel to improve connections with those with expertise in bioinformatics. The demonstration was loading two PromethION flow cells in a P2 with large copper butterfly DNA. Ben Price, natural history museum in London curator, spoke about the local extinction of this species and the need to generate a reference. Price noted that a reference genome is needed to compare the historical materials they have access to. The Natural History Museum has several projects involving reference libraries. They have 23 Gbases of data of the copper butterfly libraries with about nine hours of sequencing. The second sample they ran during the demo was a monkey sample. Fordham spoke about reducing the barriers to entry and increasing collaboration through the exchange of knowledge. I wonder how we could if we could use this and other ORG.one resources in the new lab-based course I am designing. Within 48 hours, the team doing the demo went from sample to data!
