Oxford Nanopore's MinION is a small, portable USB-powered sensing device which is powered by nanopore technology. It is adaptable to the analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins or small molecules, and Oxford Nanopore's workflows are capable of performing real-time biological analyses. In this presentation we give a brief introduction to how the technology works, and we describe our work using the MinION for de novo assembly of microbial genomes, real-time identification of bacterial and viral species in complex metagenomics samples, and isolation and characterisation of new bacterial strains and species.