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Hi, believe it or not, I have actually done what the authors were attempting. I used saliva rather than blood as a source of DNA and extracted it using a Qiagen kit.

My Nanopore flow cell had nearly every pore working from the start. So I would say that is not normal. Maybe it was stored incorrectly.

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Do you have a write up somewhere? If not, it would be amazing if you wrote one!

I was planning on doing a similar thing (also with saliva) once I finished moving in and had a bit more time after conferences. (But, of course, I’d have to go through and actually figure out all of the mechanics and so on.)

Thanks for the kind words! I have not written it up but would like to. A word of warning: by trying to get into sequencing, I eventually burned through ~20k USD of student loans (still unpaid) with little to show. Nanopore sequencing also requires some specialized equipment (at least a micro centrifuge and micropipette and possibly more) which is not cheap.

For sure, I think it’d be fun to show it can be done under 5k or so, which would be close ish. Can probably get older equipment from university surplus, but yeah, these are the “things that need to get figured out” :)

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