MinION is almost here...

Breaking news: AGBT Feb 14th: David Jaffe from the Broad Institute is presenting a talk titled: “Assembly of Bacterial Genomes Using Long Nanopore Reads”. My assumption is that this is ONT, it may not be but see you there anyway.


Almost there. Registration to the MinION early access program (MAP) closed yesterday, and according to ONT they had a big response, no surprise there!

Soon those first users will receive their invitation to formally join and then finally get hold of their MinIONs to start generating data. ONT cautiously point out that the MAP was heavily oversubscribed and this means not everyone will get hold of the technology, and those that do will not necessarily get as many as they'd asked for.

I'm happy to see that ONT are going to spread the technology around, and I'm sure they'll be selecting partners on the basis of how the MinION will fit with their biological questions.

The first MinIONs should land in just over six weeks!

Will anyone have really early access data to present at AGBT this year? I'm sure many of us will be talking about the prospects of this paradigm shifting technology over a few beers. MinION is not going to knock Illumina's X Ten announcement too hard, but I'm sure Illumina will be keeping a very close ear to the group about developments from MAP partners.