Scientists develop Android app that can analyse COVID-19 genome in minutes

A new genome sequencing app has been developed by scientists that can analyse the genome of SARS-CoV-2 within minutes. The app named Genopo is available for download on Google Play Store for free. According to a study published in the journal Communications Biology, Genopo app took less than 30 minutes, depending on the brand of the smartphone, to determine the complete genome sequence of the human coronavirus. 

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About Genopo app

The study describes Genopo as a mobile toolkit for nanopore sequencing analysis. Genopo compacts popular bioinformatics tools to an Android application, enabling fully portable computation. This is one of its kind development because it is the first-ever smartphone application for nanopore sequencing analysis. There is a portable device for DNA sequencing called MinION, developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), but Genopo is the first mobile application for this purpose. 

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The development of Genopo is also important because not everyone has access to high-power computing to use a device like MinION, but most people have a smartphone in this day and age, which will enable them to access the free Android application more flexibly. To use Genopo and to produce results under 30 minutes, a minimum RAM of 4GB is advisable as it proved while executing the workflow. 

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The application can execute a bioinformatics workflow on a nanopore-sequencing dataset copied or downloaded to the device storage. "Genopo already supports a variety of popular tools and is designed for compatibility with many common bioinformatics analyses, including sequence alignment, variant detection, and DNA methylation profiling," the authors said in the study. 

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