Is Oxford NANOPORE technology obsolete before commercial launch?

[nucacidhunter]

An interesting paper integrating Nanopores with optical detection rather than current sensing.
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/...189.html#close

[ymc]

Well, even ONT took almost 10 years to go from a research paper to a beta device, I think it is too premature to say whether this new tech will amount to anything interesting for now.

[ymc]

The fine prints of this paper mentioned that this tech is already licensed to ONT. So this is not going to be a competitor of ONT.

If the current minion can be scaled to output 40Gb per box in the near future as ONT claimed, I don't see any big need for even higher throughput in the near future for this tech (or perhaps this tech is the secret behind the 40Gb output?). It is more important to improve the read accuracy to be on par with PacBio IMHO.

[nucacidhunter]

It may not affect ONT, but people (specially graduate students) who put their resources developing software for current ONT platform will be disappointed once they switch to optical detection.