3 ms·
It's made of plastic, glass, and the special protein pores which split the strand and read the DNA. Reagents and sample are applied to it to make the reaction h
by searine 6y ago
It's made of plastic, glass, and the special protein pores which split the strand and read the DNA. Reagents and sample are applied to it to make the reaction happen.
The flowcell gets contaminated with your sample after one run so they are 'one time use'. The nanonpore protein eventually stops working also.
They are expensive because doing molecular biology is expensive. It requires expensive machines and expensive reagents at atomic scales to create. Thus money is required.
- tdido 6y agoActually, one of the main features of this tech apart from the obvious size-factor is that it's a streaming process. You can analyse data on the fly and decide when to stop the run. Wash the flowcell, and use it for another sample. Eventually the pores die, yes, how fast depends on the sample type. I think they guarantee 48 hours or something of the sort. The expensive part is not the chemistry. Each flowcell has a very expensive piece of metal that senses the very small current variations that each kmer causes when going through each pore. They've actually come up with a device (horribly named "flongle") that has the same shape of a flowcell but no pores, and the mini flowcell it uses is ~90USD (against ~900USD for a full flowcell). Of course, yield is much lower.