Tonight I watched the Nanopore Community Meeting: Singapore 2023 session entitled “Product demo: Anyone and anything: unleashing the power of PromethION for human genomics to conservation.” Dan Fordham from Strategic Product Management, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), spoke about the capabilities of human sequencing from extraction to data. They also explained the Org.one program and how PromethION helps. The PromethION flow cell can produce up to 200 Gbases of data depending on application. With Kit 14 and published protocols, there are opportunities for N50 greater than 30 Kb and impressive output with PromethION flow cells. The availability of different devices capable of using the PromethION flow cells allows users to scale depending on needs: from the P2S to the PromethION 48. Fordham shared a figure depicting the power of adaptive sampling and coverage control. Adaptive sampling does not require additional sample preparation or manipulation. With Kit 14, reads obtained can be above Q20. More duplex sequencing tools and applications are available that increase the output. Duplex sequencing is computer intensive, warned Fordham. The EPI2ME platform offers bioinformatics workflows for several applications. Org.one is Nanopore’s biodiversity program that offers reagents to those with access to DNA from endangered species and willing to share sequencing data. A student from NTU in Singapore spoke about the turtle they were sequencing. The genomic data helps understand the true genomic diversity of this endangered species. They also have a project focusing on metagenomics of the turtle nests. Fordham’s session was brief and emphasized the different applications of sequencing with PromethION flow cells, including conservation efforts. This session was timely because today we spoke about a new alligator genomics project we will start!
