Today, I watched the beginning of an Oxford Nanopore Technologies special recording. The title is “Celebrating a decade of DNA discoveries: 10 years of the MinION in microbiology.” This session was from June 14th, 2024, at the ASM Microbe meeting. Pomeranz began by introducing the ONT and noting that there have been over 13,000 publications using the technology. This session at ASM Microbe has four speakers and a panel. Joshua Quick, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Birmingham, was the first presenter. Quick shared their first run: a P. aeruginosa serotype-defining single read. Quick shared photos of the different MinIONs over the years and the Ligation Sequencing Kits (LSK). The fast-evolving technology resulted in the Pore Camp (@porecampupdates) training. These training camps took place in Texas, the UK… sequencing crabs, scorpions, and beer. Quick shared that one flow cell was needed per sample at the time. Base calling had to take place after the run. Outbreak samples were sequenced with early ligation kits in 2015. Since the ebola outbreak, numerous other outbreak samples were sequenced with ONT. Quick ended with some funny AI-generated images that emphasized the progression of the technology. This was a great first talk of this session!
