Takeaways from mobile DNA barcoding with BentoLab and MinION

Nanopore sequencing is going places. Since the release of the MinION sequencer in 2014, it has been applied to great effect in some of the remotest and harshest of environments, and even in space. One of the most common applications of the MinION is for nanopore-based DNA barcoding in situ for species identification and discovery, yet existing capabilities are limited by their small sample size. Here, we assembled a portable sequencing setup comprising the BentoLab and MinION, and developed a workflow capable of processing 32 samples simultaneously. We demonstrated this enhanced sample-to-sequence capability out at sea. In under 9 h, we generated a total of 105 MinION barcodes, of which 19 belonged to fresh animals processed immediately after collection. Our setup is thus viable and would greatly fortify existing portable DNA barcoding capabilities. We also tested the performance of the newly released R10.3 nanopore flow cell for DNA barcoding, and showed that the barcodes generated were approximately 99.9 percent accurate when compared to Illumina references. 80 percent of the R10.3 nanopore barcodes also had zero base ambiguities, compared to 50 to 60 percent for R9.4.1, suggesting an improved homopolymer resolution and making its use highly recommended.