what kind of applications do you think will become most popular?
it depends what works best i guess. metagenomics of various types- detecting environmental pathogens, working out whats up with people's digestive systems, all sorts. ONT is the only way to give quick results for that and when you're trying to contain a disease outbreak or find out what antibiotics someone needs to save their life, that is important. blood tests for cancer (or at least types that circulate cell free DNA) and other diagnostics. environmental monitoring.
the vast majority of covid data is ONT because its quick and cheap, so you can get high enough coverage for reasonable variant calling and thus tracking. so any disease tracking will use it.
do you think we're far from these dongle type devices being able to write as well as read? i know there's been some promising research into using DNA for digital data storage...
i have no idea!! that would be super cool though and i'm sure someone is working on it. dna is insanely compressed. because depending on where you start reading, the same region can be coding different amino acids. the shapes encode data too, like where to start and end transcription.
this makes me wonder what other unexpected possibilities may open up when DNA sequencing becomes affordable and portable enough that a student can do hands-on research in his/her dorm room
that would be super cool, though its a little way off still. the student would need the reagents and equipment required (not actually that much and atm about a tenner per run of ~100k reads of average length ~2k so not prohibitively expensive) for library prep, i.e. turning your sample into the type of thing that you can input to a sequencer. then they need a computer with a decent GPU for basecalling (standard gaming ones are fine) and then RAM - at least 50GB- and decent processors, you want to support at least 48 hyperthreads with a reasonable clock speed, so you can actually analyse your data. most people use supercomputing clusters to analyse biological data at present. i use a desktop but its a bespoke bioinformatics rig that cost about £7k.
but i reckon in 5-10 years it will be possible. that would be so cool. lol if you got a cold you could sequence it straight away, compare against your genetics, and find out how it was likely to affect you.
basically, its a cliche, but the possibilities are endless. if you can imagine it, someone is trying it.