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By Katherine Bourzac

For DNA sequencing to become a routine part of patient care, it needs to become cheaper and faster. A company called Oxford Nanopore hopes to bring down both the cost and the time required for sequencing using a technique called nanopore sequencing. The company has now made an important demonstration of its technology: for the first time, researchers were able to identify DNA bases with near total accuracy. In addition to identifying the four bases of DNA, the technique can also detect a modified version of one of the bases, which may be responsible for causing cancer and other diseases.

The new technique allows for the direct identification of bases without the fluorescent labels and imaging equipment used for conventional high-speed sequencing. Direct reading of DNA should not only be faster and cheaper, but it should also make it possible to perform more complex analysis, says Jeffrey Schloss, program director for technology development at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute. The Oxford Nanopore system's ability to detect the DNA modifications catalogued by an emerging field called epigenetics is particularly exciting, says Schloss. For example, the addition of organic molecules called methyl groups to one of the bases has been shown to play a role in the development of diseases such as cancer. But it is arduous to detect these modifications using conventional sequencing methods, so the full effects and why they happen are still not well understood.