> Anyone have an idea of a market or research project where this thing is a first-choice tool?
Plants. They often have huge genomes with sections that are hard to sequence with traditional methods with shorter read lengths.
The part I was really interested in was why portability matters, instead of just having a bench-top Nanopore. I think the idea is that it will be more hobbyist friendly, would be fun to sequence random stuff while hiking. My concern is that the market for these devices isn’t actually that large, as any place doing meaningful analytics is probably going to want a bench top unit.
Looking at the prices, now, though I think $1,000 for the minION is about what I’d be willing to pay for that vs a $50,000 benchtop unit. The fact that it does RNA too is huge, as that has a lot of benefits to doing it as close to site of harvest.
It's possible to learn from guidebooks, but I often find the descriptions a bit hard to interpret.