Goal: to check that your flow cell has a minimum of 800 functional nanopores.

Your Starter Pack contains one flow cell, which should be used for the Lambda Control experiment. The flow cell contains the nanopores and the sensing chemistry used in nanopore sequencing. It also contains the circuitry required to convert the current flow through the pore into an electrical signal that is used to sequence DNA.

The flow cell sensor array has 2048 wells and typically contains over 1,000 nanopores. These wells are connected to electrical channels and you can only record up to 512 channels at any one time.

MinKNOW can run a check of the flow cell to see how many nanopores can be used for sequencing. We strongly advise that the flow cells are checked before performing a sequencing run.

The following section will walk you through performing the flow cell check.