A team of researchers from Canada and United Kingdom led by Dr. Jared Simpson conducted a study to examine the capability of Oxford Nanopore's MinION^TM as a sequencer device.

The nanopore device is a tiny genome sequencer that has the ability to generate vast amounts of data and read long stretches of genome to allow reconstruction. However, the device produces inaccurate single reads. To overcome this problem, the researchers devised three stages with this device. First, the overlaps are detected between reads and then corrected by multiple-alignment process. Second, the corrected reads are clustered using the Celera assembler. Lastly, assembly is refined using a probabilistic model of the electric signals caused by DNA moving through the nanopore.

Using this method, the researchers were able to sequence and assemble a new full genome of Escherichia coli. This finding provides evidence of the potential use of this technology to sequence genomes in more complex organisms.

 Read the details of their study at Ontario Institute for Cancer Research's website.

Figure 1: Single-contig assembly of E. coli K-12 MG1655.

(a) Dot plot comparing our assembly with the reference genome.

(b) Histogram of read coverage when nanopore reads are aligned against the assembled genome.

(c) Read coverage and G+C composition across the length of the assembled genome