It’s been a long time since Chad Nusbaum has seen a conference room go so quiet so fast.
A speaker from Oxford Nanopore Technologies had just described the company’s new disposable device, which will sell for less than $900. The size of a USB memory stick, it reads individual chemical bases on a strand of DNA as it passes through a tiny hole, measuring differences in electrical conductivity to reveal their identity. A larger version of the device will stack in arrays that are projected to be able to sequence a human genome in 15 minutes.