Nanopore Community Meeting: Progress Despite the Pandemic

I realized a few Oxford Nanopore announcements too late that I should have tried to log all their predictions with a date made so I could track carefully any delays or quiet disappearances from the new feature lineup.  If I had done that, this year would have presented an even worse conundrum: how do you score progress in a year of constant disruptions?  Like many companies in the sequencing field, at least some of that disruption has been a diversion of attention and resources to fighting the pandemic.  For ONT that is largely supporting the ARTIC viral genome sequencing and also developing LamPORE diagnostics.

BGI Floats Idea of Tape-Based Sequencer

I reported on the AGBT 2020 final talk a few centuries ago -- or at least it seems like that given how quickly the world went to hell just after that -- by BGI in which Rade Drmanac showed off a system which I described as a deconstructed sequencer -- an integrated set of plate handling robots, liquid handlers and imagers which dipped the slides into reservoirs of reagents instead of flowing them through a flowcell.  Now BGI has a preprint on BioRxiv which takes this idea a bit further, changing out the reagent tanks for a polymer film on which a thin layer of reagent is distributed, which is then pressed gently against the slide surface to deliver the reagent to the DNA Nanoball (DNB) array.  The preprint is filled with eye-popping numbers -- Petabase sequencing!