Molecular fireworks could produce '30-minute genomes'

Tue, 12/02/2008 - 03:03 - NLN

The Human Genome Project completed its first draft in 2000 after 10 years' work. Now a Californian company has unveiled details of a technique that it says could sequence a person's entire genome in half an hour, for under $1000.

Sequencing is the process of working out the order in which nucleotide bases appear in a strand of DNA. Until recently, this was only possible for short portions of DNA, so the most common technique involved chopping DNA into short strands, working out the sequence in each and then stitching the data together to recreate the complete genome. This process has to be repeated many times with overlapping strands of DNA to get an accurate map, which is one reason it takes so long. Now a team at Pacific BioSciences in Menlo Park, California, says it has worked out how to speed up the process.

Read full story at New Scientist.

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