[owlmonkey]

Totally agree with you on the computation costs.

In some slides in February ONT hinted at why they had to go to a full wet sample prep and it related to input DNA amounts I believe. Their new sample prep they said allowed them to reduce their input DNA amounts to similar amounts as competitor sequencers, but without that new prep it took 10,000x more DNA to load. I guess raw DNA just doesn't load into the nanopores very easily, so it took that much higher concentration. Two years ago they claimed you could load raw blood into a chip after a 5 minute prep, but I'm guessing they will back away from that claim now since this wet chemistry is needed to get reasonable loading.

This to me implies that all nanopore technology under development will encounter similar problems. They really need biological or magnetic bead processes to "load" DNA through the pores in one form or another - or else need prohibitively high DNA concentrations and amounts - so that will mean wet chemistry.