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Comment by teekert

We are not “in the nanopore era of sequencing”. We are (still) firmly in the sequencing by synthesis era.

Yes it requires chopping the genome opening small(er) pieces (than with Nanopore sequencing) and then reconstructing the genome based on a reference (and this has its issues). But Nanopore sequencing is still far from perfect due to its high error rate. Any clinical sequencing is still done using sequencing by synthesis (at which Illumina has gotten very good over the past decade).

Nanopore devices are truly cool, small and comparatively cheap though, and you can compensate for the error rate by just sequence everything multiple times. I’m not too familiar with the economics of this approach though.

With sbs technology you could probably sequence your whole genome 30 times (a normal “coverage”) for below 1000€/$ with a reputable company. I’ve seen 180$, but not sure if I’d trust that.

parent teekert 1 year ago

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