Monday, November 8, 2021

Somebody pulled off protein sequencing by nanopore!

 I've got almost as many unfinished blog posts as manuscripts open on my desktop and some pressure to wrap up some things before others, but -- holy cow -- this is fantastic! 


Not only do they pull off sequencing a protein, but pull it back in reverse it to do it again! Full de novo single protein sequencing from a single protein molecule. Sure, it's slow, but have you seen their solutions for speeding up their DNA sequencers? 


I only x'ed out the one that, in my ever humble opinion, is dumb (it's a cheaper version with too many limitations to make it useful for anything I can think of). You can plug your single sequencer into your laptop with a MinIon (I only have an older one and its a little big for a thumb drive. Think about 1/3 the size of a small iPhone) and if you need to do more sequencing you can plug a bunch of them into a GridIon and plug that into your laptop. And if you need a crap ton of throughput you can plug several hundred of these things into a big box called a PromethIon. 

1 comment:

  1. I've been enjoying this blog for a few years now, but I feel I have to step in to defend the humble (if poorly named) Flongle. You can do a lot with 500Mb-2Gb of long read data - especially if you're interested in sequencing a few bacterial or small eukaryotic genome, but don't have enough samples to make a full MinION worthwhile. And they only needed 211 reads to identify the peptide variants - I've gotten 100,000+ from a Flongle before. For ~70USD, being able to confidently identify a protein, including single amino acid variants, using mostly tools/supplies you probably already have in your lab, with a machine that doubles as a DNA sequencer? I can see that being very useful for anyone doing protein expression & modification, e.g. monoclonal antibodies.

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