Charles C. Kayuki from the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute in Mikocheni, Tanzania, presented at London Calling 2019 on “Portable DNA sequencing in remote East African farms.” They are using genomics to fight plant pathogens, focusing on cassava. Kayuki explained that it is an easy crop to grow and drought-resistant. It is susceptible to two important […]
Daniel P. Depledge from New York University presented at London Calling 2019 on “Redefining the transcriptional complexity of viral pathogens using direct RNA sequencing.” Depledge started with a slide and the question: Got herpes? They are fascinated with herpes viruses and their multiple features and applications. Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is a 152 […]
Heather Drexler from Harvard Medical School presented at London Calling 2019 on “Direct sequencing of nascent RNA exposes splicing kinetics and order.” For example, Drexler explained that RNA splicing is complex, with distant exons being joined. Drexler emphasized that transcription rates affect alternative splicing and that transcription and splicing are physically and mechanistically coupled. The […]
Stella Loke from Deakin University in Australia spoke at London Calling 2019 about “Optimising plant DNA extraction for nanopore sequencing.” We are considering sequencing plant DNA this summer and, therefore, want to learn more about plant DNA challenges. Loke spoke about wanting the nano spec readings from Qubit to match the nano spectrophotometer. Loke confirms […]
Yufan Fan from Johns Hopkins University presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting in December 2017. I had not watched this session, and the title captured my attention: Bacterial DNA modifications with Nanopore sequencing. This session was short and full of information. Fan spoke about how bacteria can unleash endonucleases to cut foreign DNA. Their own […]
Chen Yong from Oxford Nanopore helped facilitate the Knowledge Exchange session I watched tonight: “Decoding the epigenome with Oxford Nanopore real-time methylation detection.” This webinar was recorded. Sayonika Mohanta from ONT explained that methylation is central to gene expression. They spoke about the role of methylation in gene expression: her or hypo methylation can affect […]
Tonight, I watched a recording from the Nanopore Community Meeting 2021 featuring Alexander Wittenberg from KeyGene in the Netherlands. They presented “Accuracy improvements in crop genome assembly using the Q20+ chemistry.” KeyGene is a crop innovation company, and they are generating new tools for genome assembly and structural variant analysis, among other analyses. They built […]
Alaina Shumate from Johns Hopkins University was a speaker at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2021. Shumate was a graduate student and worked on “The annotation of novel genes in a complete human genome.” They noted that in 2003, scientists “finished” the human genome, but reions were still incomplete. In 2021, the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium was […]
Luca Degradi from the University of Milan in Italy presented at London Calling 2021 about “Chromosome-level genome assembly of Fusarium musae using MinION.” They described this organism as a “cross-kingdom pathogen” reported by the HUPLANTcontrol program in Europe. The organism can infect bananas and humans! The first infection seems to have been a human. At […]
Teresa Street from the University of Oxford in the UK presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2019 on “Metagenomic nanopore sequencing for analysis of orthopedic device-related infection.” Street spoke about the impact of hip, knee, shoulder, elbow, and ankle replacements and the percentage of revisions due to the suspicion of infection. Further surgeries are often […]