The "Op" stands for Optical
The company's name, OpGen, is based on the fact that the core scientific process behind the business is called "optical mapping" which is, in short, a technique for taking physical samples of DNA and creating a visual representation of it such that unique organisms can be easily differentiated from each other and similarities between other organisms can be easily spotted. The whole concept is that you can break up DNA into many fragments and then put those fragments together in a line and you get what we call a "map". What's useful about this is that similar organisms will consistently and repeatedly break up in the same way such that their maps are very similar. As you'll see later, these maps almost look like barcodes and you can actually think of them as such, or as a "fingerprint" which uniquely identifies an organism. Here's an example of what one might look like:
What's it for?
The most interesting applications for optical mapping that I am aware of are in the area of what we call "comparative genomics" (other people might call it something else). Basically, it's the practice of looking at a number of similar or related organisms and analyzing what's different about them. For instance, say you have maps of two isolates of the same species of bacteria that cause infections in humans. Furthermore, say that one of those isolates is known to be extremely nasty and hard to treat, while the other is easily killed off with a round of antibiotics. By comparing the maps of these two bugs, you can actually see where the two are genetically different. Those parts that are different most likely indicate where the nastiness of the bacteria is regulated and can point the way for researchers to know where to look when trying to figure out how to combat that strain.
Coming soon...
In future posts I'll tell you more detail about how we actually create those maps and talk about the software I'm working on and how it pertains to these maps.
