Sophie Colston from the US Naval Research Laboratory presented at London Calling 2019 on “Field forward sequencing in naval environments.” The title of this session caught my attention as it aligns well with the course I am developing. Colston is a microbiologist. The Naval Research Lab (NRL) supports research and technological development. The NRL has several projects that use next-generation sequencing. The NRL has a branch that explores biological questions. Colston works on the ship microbiomes project investigating “the built environment of an operational afloat naval asset.” The goals were to sequence and collect/store samples at ambient temperature. The approach was to do a 16S amplification library prep. They sampled surfaces of the ships. Colston explained they also wanted to address biological threat detection with their portable MinION lab. Their setup was portable and independent of ship power.
