The Roche Nanopore Sequencer
Roche have announced a webinar for the 20th of February about their new Nanopore sequencer, it looks exciting!1
Highlights are:
8M sensor array.
500M bases/second.
15B reads in 4 hours.
Longer reads than traditional short read platforms.
Uses Xpandomers.
Summary
My detailed thoughts are below. But my high level thoughts are:
Very high density, high throughput
Cheaper fabrication than Oxford Nanopore
The chemistry is awful.
They should still buy Oxford Nanopore…
So far this is all inline with their previous presentation.
The biggest change is that is seems to be producing data? Maybe?
If so, they’ve beaten Oxford to some important density milestones. But the result is a platform that isn’t that compelling, and they should still buy Oxford Nanopore if they are serious about Nanopores2
Well Size
Oxford have used a well size in the region of 100 to 150 microns. They have proposed 40 micron wells, but not yet publicly demonstrated this.
Previously Roche showed much smaller wells, on the order of 4 microns: