When it comes to DNA, France has always been behind the times. Never mind the hefty fines and prison sentence a man apparently can get for trying to order a paternity test, it seems that just knowing your own genetic sequence is offensive enough.
Now that the much anticipated MinION USB stick genome sequencer has finally been rolled out, it’s going to be a whole lot tougher for the gene police.
The MinION took a little longer than we originally reported. Even now the 4-inch USB stick has only been made available to select labs Oxford Nanopore has chosen to let purchase the device. Early reports suggest that the MinION will indeed be all that it had originally claimed — namely, have the ability to sequence long reads (i.e. 80,000 base letters long) and up to 150 million bases in six hours. The main concern now is its accuracy.
Some researchers are claiming that they are only getting about 65 to 80 percentaccuracy out of the device. Fortunately for the French citizenry, if only a limited percentage of genome report is correct you could probably make the case that you don’t really know your DNA. The key to getting reliable reads from unreliable nanopore readers is simple redundancy.
Provided the sequencing errors are not significantly correlated, and the sequencing can be perpetuated without performance decay, then in theory any arbitrary degree of accuracy can be attained.
Read the full, original story: MinION USB stick gene sequencer finally comes to market
