ORG.one is an initiative from Oxford Nanopore wherein one can apply for free Nanopore consumables for genome sequencing of critically endangered species. Together with a colleague I applied earlier this year, and we were accepted. The sequencing reagents arrived a few weeks ago - two flow cells and one LSK110 sequencing kit. This is the first time I have used the LSK110 kit (until now I have used LSK109), and it seems to work very well. The yields were high, 34 and 37 Gbases, respectively. These flow cells stayed alive for almost a week (with frequent nuclease flushes). I actually added another 24 hours of sequencing time after 5 days of runtime, and got another ~1.6 Gbase of sequence!
A few oddities during the runs: The translocation speed on the flow cell on our MinION Mk1B was slightly high; starting out just above the green zone. The quality score was also marginally lower than for the other flow cell.
After 4 days, out of nowhere, reads suddenly began going to the "Skipped" folder. A few hours later this behaviour stopped. I have no idea why.
The other flow cell was run simultaneously on our Mk1C. After a nuclease flush, suddenly the pores on the sides of the sensor chip no longer worked, and a large proportion of the channels had changed status to "Saturated". However, multiple manual Mux scans gradually brought them back to life. The same happened on every subsequent nuclease flush.
