Informatics

Oxford Nanopore's informatics team is led by Clive G Brown.  The team includes software engineers, bioinformaticians and statisticians.  The team's priority is the DNA sequencing system where they are working to ensure delivery of a new generation of sequencer with an improved workflow, simplified and powerful data analysis and a user-oriented interface.

DNA sequencing informatics
The sequencing system has many qualities that differentiate it from conventional DNA sequencing systems.  These include:
  • The signal output is the frequent electonic measurement of a current passing through a nanopore, multiplexed into a large number of parallel channels. 
  • There are no fluorescent/optical measurements.  The volume of data per base may be dramatically reduced from existing technologies. 
  • The identification of a single DNA base is performed by recording the magnitude of a disruption in current as the base passes through the nanopore.  The magnitude of disruption by each base is different and characteristic.  In the instance that there may be any ambiguities, these are two-way rather than four-way.  This is illustrated in the histogram below from the recent Nature Nanotechnology paper (click here for more information about nanopore chemistry) 
  • The nanopore sequencing system records data in real time through a series of individual channels.  Read length is therefore independent of run time of the instrument.
  • The quality of a base towards the end of a read is of the same average quality as that at the beginning of a read.


For more information on the DNA system's informatics, click here for a recent interview with Clive Brown on the Oxford Nanopore DNA Sequencing informatics, in Bio IT World.

Informatics for other applications
The electronic signal generated by the nanopore is consistent, regardless of the target analyte.  For ligand-protein analysis researchers may be looking for a specific type of current disrution to match a specific target analyte, and may wish to analyse the frequency of on-off events to give information about concentration of that analyte.

More information about informatics for other applications will be supplied in due course.