PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - de Lannoy, Carlos AU - de Ridder, Dick AU - Risse, Judith TI - A sequencer coming of age: <em>de novo</em> genome assembly using MinION reads AID - 10.1101/142711 DP - 2017 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 142711 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/26/142711.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/26/142711.full AB - Nanopore technology provides a novel approach to DNA sequencing that yields long, label-free reads of constant quality. The first commercial implementation of this approach, the MinION, has shown promise in various sequencing applications. The presented literature review gives an up-to-date overview of the MinION’s utility as a de novo sequencing device. It is argued that the MinION may allow for portable and affordable de novo sequencing of even complex genomes in the near future, despite the currently error-prone nature of its reads. Through continuous updates to the MinION hardware and the development of new assembly pipelines, both sequencing accuracy and assembly quality have already risen rapidly. However, this fast pace of development has also lead to a lack of oversight in the expanding landscape of analysis tools, as performance evaluations are outdated quickly. Now that the MinION is approaching a state of maturity, a thorough comparative benchmarking effort of de novo assembly pipelines may be at place.