The Oxford Nanopore revolution

1:07:00insanely cool technology >> here's how it works okay it's it goes to biohysical detection what you do is you take your native DNA strand and you pass it through a nanopore. It's a little hole in a membrane kind of like ion channels like the the the pro the there's a membrane that separates in and out and then you've got a you've got a little hole that's made out of protein that one strand of DNA goes through there. There's a thing above it that unzips the DNA so that one strand goes this way, one strand goes through. Okay? And what you're going to do is measure the current across the membrane. Okay? the the the current that's going through

1:07:41from from this side to this side. Now, A, T, G, and C are different molecules. They're they have different sizes. They have different little residues. One, they have different shapes. And so, every time the four goes through, there's going to be a tiny different current for each of the four. >> Isn't that sick? >> I'm so We're so smart, dude. Isn't that so sick? >> That's very clever. The visual analogy I sort of think about is like if you unzip the zipper of your jacket, it's like the unzipping of the DNA. And each of these are then going into something that's going to read >> each segment of four, which is basically just going to have a different fingerprint.

1:08:21>> Exactly. Like imagine imagine your zipper. Let's go with that analogy. I like that. Imagine your zipper, but each of those tiny little zip thingies is a different um composition of plastic. Okay? And so when I go through this like little hole, it's going to sound different, right? The the red plastic is going to sound different from the white plastic. And so if I've got a little sound recorder that just records the right, I can I can then have a computer program >> decode what type of plastic was the four zipper parts. And that's what's happening here. And so on the right hand side, you see the current versus the time. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Completely different signatures. And then you've got like, you know, it's probably not even machine learning. This

1:09:03is a very simple like computational task to do. >> This is really good. >> Okay. Now, this was originally um this was originally invented for just genome sequencing cuz A, T's, G's, and C's, right? But now a C with a methyl group is going to sound even more different. >> Bingo. >> You see? >> Bingo. Yeah. Makes total sense. >> So, there's just going to be a fifth signature >> signature >> that I have to look for. >> Yep. That it makes to I mean, it makes total sense. It makes total sense.