The brief

Analyst view

• Oxford Nanopore listed on the London Stock Exchange in October 2021 and entered the FTSE 250 in 2024.
• The company is developing improved sequencing chemistry to enable sequencing two human genomes per PromethION flow cell.
• A Q-Line version of the high-throughput PromethION sequencer is expected to launch in 2026.

Technical approach

As reported

Nanopore sensing

Single nanopores measure DNA passage

A tiny pore in a membrane reads each base as the DNA strand moves through, detecting current disruptions that identify the nucleotide sequence in real time.

No batching

Reads start immediately

Data flows live during the run, no waiting for chemistry or washing between batches. The instrument does methylation calling and basecalling in real time.

Ultra-long reads

Complete sequences from 20bp to 4Mb

Reads stay native to the DNA strand, not chopped up. This captures structural variants and full-length transcripts that short reads cannot.