Cassava Mosaic Virus is one of the most destructive pathogens affecting a crop that hundreds of millions of people depend on. By the time symptoms are visible, the virus has typically already spread.

In 2019, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a report on the Cassava Virus Action Project's work in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. The project combined the PDQeX Nucleic Acid Extractor for field DNA extraction with Oxford Nanopore's MinION for real-time sequencing.

The entire process: selecting samples on the farm, preparing DNA, sequencing, interpreting results; was completed in under 4 hours. All devices ran on battery power, outdoors, at isolated farms.

Without a rapid, portable extraction method that requires no centrifuge and no column washes, field-deployable genomic analysis of this kind is not possible.

Shaffer L. PNAS 116(9):3351–3353 (2019).

Image credit: Laura Boykin