The Minority Report

Now I don’t know DNA sequencing from a movie fight sequence but the video that I watched this morning is amazing. Every advance made in gene sequencing puts us closer and closer to personalized medicine. I know I will never see the day when I walk into my doctors office, give blood and then get my personalized medicine but my grandchildren might due to advances like this one.

The clever boys and girls at Oxford Nanopore Technologies -- one of the most quietly impressive contenders in the hotly-contested next-generation DNA sequencing race -- have a new paper out in Nature Nanotechnology today. The paper demonstrates proof of principle for a crucial step in their approach to DNA sequencing, the accurate recognition of DNA bases as they pass through a tiny protein nanopore.

Genetic Future : Direct reading of DNA with protein nanopores: Oxford Nanopore demonstrates proof of principle

Put simply, the system works by sequentially chewing DNA bases off the end of a long strand and then detecting each cleaved base as it falls through a protein nanopore.

Genetic Future : Direct reading of DNA with protein nanopores: Oxford Nanopore demonstrates proof of principle