 | |
| Company type | Public limited company |
|---|---|
| LSE: ONT | |
| ISIN | GB00BP6S8Z30 |
| Industry | Nanopore sequencing |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | , |
Key people |
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| Revenue |  £169.7 million (2023) [1] |
| £(168.7) million (2023) [1] | |
| £(154.5) million (2023) [1] | |
| Website | nanoporetech |
Oxford Nanopore Technologies plc is a UK-based company which develops and sells nanopore sequencing products (including the portable DNA sequencer, MinION) for the direct, electronic analysis of single molecules. [2] [3] [4]
The company was founded in 2005 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford by Hagan Bayley, [5] Gordon Sanghera, and Spike Willcocks, with seed funding from the IP Group. [6] The company made an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange on 30 September 2021, under the ticker ONT. [7]
In March 2016 the company announced a chemistry upgrade to its nanopore sequencing product 'R9', using a protein nanopore in collaboration with the laboratory of Han Remaut (VIB/Vrije Universiteit Brussel). [8] The company stated in a webcast that R9 is designed to improve error rates and yield. [9]
In July 2016, a MinION nanopore sequencer was included on the ninth NASA/SpaceX commercial cargo resupply services mission to the International Space Station. [10] The aim of the mission was to provide proof of concept for the MinION's functionality in a microgravity environment. [11] During the mission, ISS crew members successfully sequenced DNA from bacteria, bacteriophage and rodents from samples prepared on Earth. [12] Maintaining the MinION device as a research facility on the space station holds the potential to support a number of additional science investigations, any of which could have Earth based applications. [13]
The main products of Oxford Nanopore are:
These products are intended to be used for the analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules with a range of applications in personalized medicine, crop science, and scientific research. [3] [27]
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dimensional structural configuration. In contrast to genetics, which refers to the study of individual genes and their roles in inheritance, genomics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of all of an organism's genes, their interrelations and influence on the organism. Genes may direct the production of proteins with the assistance of enzymes and messenger molecules. In turn, proteins make up body structures such as organs and tissues as well as control chemical reactions and carry signals between cells. Genomics also involves the sequencing and analysis of genomes through uses of high throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to assemble and analyze the function and structure of entire genomes. Advances in genomics have triggered a revolution in discovery-based research and systems biology to facilitate understanding of even the most complex biological systems such as the brain.
A DNA sequencer is a scientific instrument used to automate the DNA sequencing process. Given a sample of DNA, a DNA sequencer is used to determine the order of the four bases: G (guanine), C (cytosine), A (adenine) and T (thymine). This is then reported as a text string, called a read. Some DNA sequencers can be also considered optical instruments as they analyze light signals originating from fluorochromes attached to nucleotides.
A nanopore is a pore of nanometer size. It may, for example, be created by a pore-forming protein or as a hole in synthetic materials such as silicon or graphene.
Nanopore sequencing is a third generation approach used in the sequencing of biopolymers — specifically, polynucleotides in the form of DNA or RNA.
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The advent of rapid DNA sequencing methods has greatly accelerated biological and medical research and discovery.
Metagenomics is the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental or clinical samples by a method called sequencing. The broad field may also be referred to as environmental genomics, ecogenomics, community genomics or microbiomics.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Illumina, Inc. is an American biotechnology company, headquartered in San Diego, California. Incorporated on April 1, 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. The company provides a line of products and services that serves the sequencing, genotyping and gene expression, and proteomics markets, and serves more than 155 countries.
Cornelis "Cees" Dekker is a Dutch physicist, and Distinguished University Professor at Delft University of Technology. He is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.
Epigenomics is the study of the complete set of epigenetic modifications on the genetic material of a cell, known as the epigenome. The field is analogous to genomics and proteomics, which are the study of the genome and proteome of a cell. Epigenetic modifications are reversible modifications on a cell's DNA or histones that affect gene expression without altering the DNA sequence. Epigenomic maintenance is a continuous process and plays an important role in stability of eukaryotic genomes by taking part in crucial biological mechanisms like DNA repair. Plant flavones are said to be inhibiting epigenomic marks that cause cancers. Two of the most characterized epigenetic modifications are DNA methylation and histone modification. Epigenetic modifications play an important role in gene expression and regulation, and are involved in numerous cellular processes such as in differentiation/development and tumorigenesis. The study of epigenetics on a global level has been made possible only recently through the adaptation of genomic high-throughput assays.
Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is the process of determining the entirety, or nearly the entirety, of the DNA sequence of an organism's genome at a single time. This entails sequencing all of an organism's chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria and, for plants, in the chloroplast.
The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics is a human genetics research centre of the Nuffield Department of Medicine in the Medical Sciences Division, University of Oxford, funded by the Wellcome Trust among others.
In DNA sequencing, a read is an inferred sequence of base pairs corresponding to all or part of a single DNA fragment. A typical sequencing experiment involves fragmentation of the genome into millions of molecules, which are size-selected and ligated to adapters. The set of fragments is referred to as a sequencing library, which is sequenced to produce a set of reads.
David Wilson Deamer is an American biologist and Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Deamer has made significant contributions to the field of membrane biophysics. His work led to a novel method of DNA sequencing and a more complete understanding of the role of membranes in the origin of life.
Sir David Klenerman is a British biophysical chemist and a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Third-generation sequencing is a class of DNA sequencing methods which produce longer sequence reads, under active development since 2008.
Marija Drndic is the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on two-dimensional materials and novel spectroscopic techniques.
Clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) is the comprehensive analysis of microbial and host genetic material in clinical samples from patients by next-generation sequencing. It uses the techniques of metagenomics to identify and characterize the genome of bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses without the need for a prior knowledge of a specific pathogen directly from clinical specimens. The capacity to detect all the potential pathogens in a sample makes metagenomic next generation sequencing a potent tool in the diagnosis of infectious disease especially when other more directed assays, such as PCR, fail. Its limitations include clinical utility, laboratory validity, sense and sensitivity, cost and regulatory considerations.
Korean Genome Project (Korea1K) is the largest genome sequencing project in Korea, first launched in 2015 as part of the Genome Korea in Ulsan. As of 2021, the project has sequenced over 10,000 human genomes and is the first large-scale data base for constructing a genetic map and diversity analysis of Koreans.
Karen Elizabeth Hayden Miga is an American geneticist who co-leads the Telomere-to-Telomore (T2T) consortium that released fully complete assembly of the human genome in March 2022. She is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Associate Director of Human Pangenomics at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. She was named as "One to Watch" in the 2020 Nature's 10 and one of Time 100’s most influential people of 2022.