Over the last few months, Oxford Nanopore (ON) instruments have been used to achieve two major sequencing milestones.

First, in December, a group in Australia announced they had become the first to generate a DNA read longer than 1 Mb when they produced a 1.105 Mb read from Chromosome 19.

Then, just last week, a paper was published in Nature Biotechnology describing how scientists used a handheld ON sequencer – the MinION – to assemble an entire human genome by direct long reads. That accomplishment is another important first that demonstrates how this technology can power breakthroughs.

To learn more about this remarkable study and the Nanopore technology, see this post on the WuXi NextCODE Genomic Insights blog. It features comments and insights from our esteemed colleague Dr. Hongye Sun, our Chief Technology Officer and head of our sequencing lab in Shanghai.

WuXi NextCODE has a lot of experience working with Nanopore instruments.  In October of last year, we announced that our Shanghai sequencing laboratory would feature the first open-access installation of ON instruments in a laboratory in China.