When 17-year-old Indeever Madireddy’s pet angelfish Calvin died, he could have unceremoniously flushed it down the toilet like so many dearly departed fish companions had been before. Instead, he sequenced the animal’s genome. “I wanted to preserve it forever,” he tells New Scientist. “I decided to sequence the genome of the angelfish with the hopes that I could contribute that information to the scientific community, while also paying a small tribute to my pet!”
Although Madireddy is an adept fishkeeper, he is a high school student in California and didn’t exactly have the resources necessary for genomic work. So, he spent about a month researching the methodology, then bought reagents and paid the modest member fee to gain access to BioCurious, a community laboratory with abundant equipment—including, most importantly for Madireddy, a -80 °C freezer and an Oxford Nanopore MinION long-read sequencer. The bulk of the sequencing costs were paid ...
