What a weekend! I am back from the NSF ENCOUR conference. I continued watching studio interviews from London Calling 2024. Tonight, the session I watched focused on pathogen surveillance and community and collaboration. Amanda Warr from The Roslin Institute spoke about learning to use Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) with metagenomic samples and troubleshooting in the lab. Now, Warr successfully sequences metagenomes and genomes with ultra-long sequencing. Mark Akeson from the University of California Santa Cruz described how, at the beginning, the throughput and accuracy were low. Now, fundamental biology can be dissected with higher accuracy and throughput. John Tyson from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control in Canada described how they tried the technology early on and developed wet lab methods. Tyson mentioned how the community helped each other learn and develop better approaches. The early collaborations helped improve the methods. The core camp uses the teach-the-teacher model. Warr noted that pathogen detection benefitted from the speed of the Nanopore technology. In the UK, they have implemented real-time respiratory diagnosis with Oxford Nanopore Technologies. The panelists joked if DNA is a teenager, RNA may be a rebellious teenager or infant. The updates to direct RNA sequencing will reveal valuable biology. All panelists agreed that simplified library preparation will enable even more advances and discoveries.
