A new development in molecular biology is a step towards enabling mobile and instant diagnosis of viruses like Ebola or Zika in the field. The Oxford Nanopore MinION device can sequence DNA and RNA in real time, and researchers at the French agriculture research center CIRAD have found a way to use the device as a tool for identifying plant viruses and potentially animal and human viruses too. The researchers at CIRAD were searching for a way to diagnose viruses quickly and early in the infection process, so they could avoid the time consuming and potentially dangerous process of transferring contaminated samples to a lab. They struck on using the portable sequencer MinION device, which in the last few years since its development has become a common tool for biological analysis techniques like de novo sequencing, targeted sequencing, metagenomics, and epigenetics. The CIRAD team were able to both test and validate that the devic...
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