the bioinformatics chat

Porcupine is a molecular tagging system—a way to tag physical objects with pieces of DNA called molecular bits, or molbits for short. These DNA tags then can be rapidly sequenced on an Oxford Nanopore MinION device without any need for library preparation.

In this episode, Katie Doroschak explains how Porcupine works—how molbits are designed and prepared, and how they are directly recognized by the software without an intermediate basecalling step.

Links:

• Porcupine: Rapid and robust tagging of physical objects using nanopore-orthogonal DNA strands (Kathryn Doroschak, Karen Zhang, Melissa Queen, Aishwarya Mandyam, Karin Strauss, Luis Ceze, Jeff Nivala)

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