CenGen has been fortunate to receive a brand new portable benchtop sequencer, the Oxford Nanopore MinION Mik1C, generously sponsored by the DIPLOMICS, AB-InBev and SABBI. In-house sequencing is new technology in our laboratory and it opens up a new world of potential projects. The MinION, which is about the size of a box of tissues, is perfect for sequencing smaller genomes (such as fungi and bacteria) and genomic regions (such as genes) at a lower cost than traditional sequencing. It is at the forefront of international genetics technology and is used widely by scientists for, amongst other things, cancer research, disease variant detection for epidemiology studies and to study disease resistance in plants.
Our pilot project involves sequencing the microbiome of barley to investigate why some barley samples have better malting abilities than others. Have a look at our project lead, Dr Helmien Barkhuizen-Roode explaining more about this project here.
