MinION Lego

I heard it. Oxford Nanopore will not be released for months. It has promised big and a lot. Many people are anxiously waiting them to release “real” data. Is it really 96% accuracy? No sample prep, no kidding?

Instead of just thinking about it, I chose to do something fun. I released my Lego MinION model at ABRF 2012, a meeting mostly for Omics facility crowd, who are often my hard working colleagues to generate more than enough data for me to analyze.

So far, I can only find three pictures of MinION on the Web. So the model is built based on those snapshots. The model can be totally wrong. But several people recognized it at the meeting without me telling them what it is.

The Lego model should be similar in size as the published pictures. The USB drive in my model is a working one. It can hold one human genome. In addition, my Lego sequencer also do not have length limit of sequencing. The average accuracy is ~25% and sample prep is optional. Another important feature is that the back of the Lego sequencer has a camera. So it can take a picture before it sequences a thing of interest.