Tonight I watched the “Welcome back to London Calling 2023” session. Rosemary Sinclair Dokos, Senior VP of Product & Programme Management at Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) was the presenter and began day two of London Calling 2023 by talking about the journey of ONT. Sinclair Dokos found several parallels between the London Underground construction and the development of ONT. It only took seven years from “cut and cover to modern engineering marvels” and tunnels under rivers and a city. The London Underground development was a disruptive technology. In 2014, the MinION was launched, followed by the GridION, PromethION, VolTRAX, Flongle… Sinclair Dokos explained that you invest in the instrument once and are able to use it for DNA and RNA applications that continue to evolve. Sinclair Dokos spoke about multi-omics platforms for protein sequencing and new gen 2 devices. ONT produces information about SNVs, modifications, genomes… The devices are scalable from MinION to PromethION. Sinclair Dokos noted that PromethION flow cell pricing was adjusted to make it more accessible for the new P2 devices. Starter packs are available for the MinION to $700,000 investments for PromethIONs and a thousand flow cells. Sinclair Dokos explained that “what you’re missing matters…” and that we’ve also found that “… how, when and where are very important.” They spoke about deployment of automation in ONT factories, improvements in flow cells, more supported end-to-end workflows, and a new focus on better deployment of software downloads. EPI2ME improvements aim for “one click informatics” and new collaborations with companies such as Agilent, Opentrons, Eppendorf, Tecan, and Hamilton will improve automation. An interesting development I heard from this session was MinKNOW “workflow” mode with defined workflows for certain applications. Just today, I noticed a new Dorado server update too. The development of TurBOT, an ONT automation instrument for sample extraction, PCR, library preparation, flow cell loading, sequencing, and analysis is exciting. I signed up for updates and hope to one day work with it in a teaching setting! Sinclair Dokos also shared the release timelines. I noticed that (direct) RNA4, cDNA v14, 16S v 14, and cyclomics kits are scheduled for release in the late summer/fall. Also, Dorado, MinKNOW, and EPI2ME updates promise one click duplex, workflow integration, and platform updates, respectively. I’m really interested in the multi-omics possibilities and improvements to the software! I wonder if we can test RNA4 for bacterial transcriptomics.
