“Today, for about a thousand dollars, you can purchase a nanopore sequencer as a peripheral that connects to any computer via USB.”
DNA goes through a hole one strand wide, and the sequencer reads the change in current at picoamp scale. Open source software decodes it in real time and can spit out the fragments it doesn’t need. Decoding a genome used to take years and a lab. Now it’s a USB device, and the hard part is the code.