ONT MAP - what do you plan to do with it?

[BBoy]

The silence on SeqAnswers post the Jaffe talk at AGBT has been deafening, perhaps on account of the wide coverage on Twitter (what has the world come to - assessing scientific results 140 characters at a time? :-).

Anyway, now we know a bit more about what the minion can and cannot do, I was wondering what people who were chosen to participate plan to do with it. The particular application that Jaffe demonstrated does not appear to be of widespread utility, in fact it is downright reminiscent of this, much more so than PacBio back in 2012. People seem to think that the minion is not a particular threat even to PacBio in the short term. If that is the case, it seems that the defining capability is portability and low capex hardware (but very high per Gb price). I am curious how people plan to leverage that.

[bios90]

Toy sequencer and education?

[BBoy]

Funny. If this could be made to work it would be a hot seller with teens. Someone from Qualcomm actually told me that if they can figure out how to do a good smell sensor it would sell like hotcakes with teens.

[DaleYuzuki]

An 'optical nose' concept has been worked on for some time - see early BeadArray technology slides circa 2002 if you can locate them. (Might be on an Illumina founder's hard drive, both of whom no longer are there.)

I could easily imagine (no I'm not one of the 'chosen') people would recapitulate what they already have done on PacBio (with 5kb reads).