[jakobnissen]

I have a colleague who is working on a portable field kit with a minION + laptop + car battery with the intent of being able to sequence and identify pathogens directly in the field, even with no electric grid.

Turns out the hardest part is the sample prep. For bioinformatics, she'll just do a simple kmer mapping against a curated database of pathogen genomes.

[aroch]

Sample prep, particularly if you want truly long reads, is 100% the hardest part.

Funnily, there are people out there who want to teach army/marine grunts on the front line to run minIONs. Most of the work is on making the sample prep automated and idiot proof.