Elizabeth Pennisi has a great news story for Science on the development of nanopore sequencing techniques. This is the technology that, at least at the moment, seems best positioned to dramatically decrease the cost of genomic sequencing and spread the technologies implementation much more broadly.
…David Deamer, a biophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and Harvard University cell biologist Daniel Branton sat in the front row, beaming. In 1996, 7 years after Deamer initially had the idea, they had publicly proposed that threading DNA through a tiny pore and monitoring changes in the current going through the pore could yield a more direct, faster way to sequence genomes. Yet until the Florida meeting, no one had claimed success in reading DNA as it moved through a pore, leaving many to wonder whether the technology would ever pan out. “Over the years, the number of people who truly believed in nanopore sequencing you could probably count on your two hands,” says Mark Akeson, a molecular biologist at UCSC. “Now both companies and academics are seeing [evidence] that this stuff actually works. This technology is going to really take off.”
One of the cool parts of the story is an image of a sketch drawing on a yellow legal pad of the idea behind the technology dating back to 1989. I also use yellow legal pads as my go-to brain-storming platform (in my office, this is heavily supplemented by a white board). Somehow, however, I doubt anything I have been sketching will be giving rise to a research and industry revolutionizing product 23 years from now.
