Roche Nanopore: Instrument Cost

AGBT has been plodding along but aside from a brief comment from Illumina that they have nanopore sequence data! Nothing has been as interesting as the pre-AGBT Roche announcement.

So, today I’m going to continue trying to figure out what’s going on in the Roche platform. In particular how much will the data acquisition and compute hardware cost, which will I imagine be the main drivers for the instrument cost-of-goods.

Let’s try and figure this out…

We have a few “raw” traces from the webinar. This is the best trace we have in terms of resolution:

Here we have ~36 data points in a 20ms window. This already implies a sample rate of at least 1.8KSPS. Acquisitions are likely synchronized to the voltage pulse that drives the xpandomer through the pore. In the BioRxiv paper they say that the Xpandomer is paused in the nanopore for 1ms during which time sampling happens, analysis uses the median of samples acquired in the last half of the sampling period.

Lower bound on data rate is therefore 14.4GSPS.

Assuming 8bit samples that’s about 50 Terabytes an hour, 350 Terabytes for a 7 hour run. Nobody is going to be storing raw data…