Forensic Nanopore SNP sequencing

One of the latest developments in next generation sequencing is Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ (ONT) MinION™ nanopore sequencer. We studied the applicability of this system to perform forensic genotyping of the forensic female DNA standard 9947A using the 52 SNP-plex assay developed by the SNPforID consortium. While only 3 SNP loci were incorrectly genotyped, several other SNP loci were identified as problematic for correct and robust genotyping using nanopore sequencing. All these loci contained homopolymers in the sequence flanking the forensic SNP and most of them were already reported as problematic in studies using other sequencing technologies. When these problematic loci are avoided, correct forensic genotyping using nanopore sequencing is technically feasible.