“It takes the most exquisite measurements you can imagine, measuring the changes in current associated with different bits of DNA,” he explains. So, how do you tell the four building blocks of DNA apart? Image via Oxford Nanopore. Push your genetic material through this pore, and the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that make up a human genome will be revealed in sequence. Imagine a hole so tiny that a single strand of DNA can fit through at a time. David Deamer ( in a stenographer’s notebook using a red ink ballpoint pen! In reality the original concept for nanopore sequencing was sketched out by Dr. “The idea for this originated about 30 years ago, and the legend is the first diagram was drawn on a napkin,” says Schatz. Michael Schatz, the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins.įirst, let’s start with a nanopore sequencer. It wasn’t so long ago that decoding a genome took years! To understand the code behind these new techniques, which have been dubbed UNCALLED, we chatted with Prof.
We’re not quite there yet, but recent breakthroughs in nanopore sequencing, driven by developments in open-source software, have made it possible to greatly reduce the time it takes to decode a genome, shrinking what used to be a 15-day process to three days or less.
#OPEN SOURCE SCANNER DRIVER FULL#
Remember the scene from the Matrix where Neo unlocks his full power, and the world around him is revealed as lines of code running in all directions? What if you could see the world around you in this way, so that the person sitting next to you was a webpage where one could right-click to inspect element and find the source code underneath?