Continuing with Devin M. Drown’s work, today I watched their Nanopore Community Meeting 2022 session entitled “Portable genomics hackathon for pathogen detection: a practical application of adaptive sampling to engage undergraduate learning.” Drown is at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Drown explained that the MinION can be used to engage students in problem-solving and applications of sequencing. The workshop they developed started with an introduction on applications in pathogen surveillance. Then, participants learned about GPUs, sequencing, bioinformatics, visualization of data, and exit surveys. Students prepared rapid libraries and Jetson compute modules. They learned how to prepare libraries and sequence with the goal of determining throughput and reproducibility of the procedure. They learned that “adaptive sampling increases target yield” but there is a cost in throughput. Drown concluded that with this workshop students apply their learning and gain confidence in important skills. I would like to learn more about this program and the compute units they used.
