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I think you're stuck in the biotech == people mindset.

On the bacterial side, it is fantastic for quickly sequcinging and closing genomes. Personally, I think the killer use case is field portable and real time sequencing of pathogens. I've worked with groups (.gov and private, defense and health related) that want to put minION + flongles to use in applications like early detection for bio terrorism and pathogen surveillance.

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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.

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.

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