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I made the DNA tricorder from front page HN. AMA

4 points by paluter ↗ HN
I didn't realize until today that my paper on iGenomics was on the front page of Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331164) and there were many points people brought up that I wished I could have responded to but HN no longer allowed comments.

Here's our paper in GigaScience: https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/9/12/giaa138/6025149 And the article from the front page HN post: https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-dna-tricorder-pocket.html

Ask me anything!

4 comments

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flubert
Does this make it feasible to make gardening robot that could differentiate weeds from the desirable plants? And if so, what is the cost of the DNA tricorder? If not, how many years are we away from something like that?
paluter
This is theoretically possible but practically the cost would be too high for an average consumer to do this right now. Right now, to learn about an organism's DNA, we'd have to first (1) sequence the DNA (actually read the raw DNA in) and (2) analyze the sequenced DNA. iGenomics is free and so the "DNA tricorder" software is free. However, the most affordable DNA sequencer as of now is the Oxford Nanopore MinION (https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion), which starts at about $1000. Oxford Nanopore is working on a more portable, and hopefully more affordable version, called the SmidgION (https://nanoporetech.com/products/smidgion) that they hope to have out within the next few years.

I'd estimate we are about 3 - 5 years away from hitting the point where ordinary people start to own DNA sequencers.

Worth noting, while DNA could be useful here, there's likely more affordable ways to differentiate between plants today.

flubert
Thanks for the reply.

>there's likely more affordable ways to differentiate between plants today.

Machine vision?

paluter
Yeah machine vision as well as, in the case of crops, various IoT sensors would be useful