[MLUG - DISCUSSION] these are the days of miracles and wonders: a radically new sequencing machine appears

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

One of the most spectacular things about molecular biology and
genetics is that it's getting to the point where things get better at
about the rate that computers and other solid state devices get
faster.  This is mind-blowing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/health/01gene.html

Right now, the commercialized version of the thing has the problem
that it can only read DNA fragments that are ~100 bp in length.  But
in-house, they're up to 400 bp.  Current technology is allegedly 800
bp per read, but that's tough to get in practice from what I can tell.
 (Read length is important for two reasons; longer reads mean less
pre-processing in some situations, plus if you have reads long enough,
you can "shotgun" huge chunks of the genome efficiently.  Shotgunning
is a technique where you blast the DNA into (what you hope are)
essentially random short sequences that are easy to read, but you do
it on multiple copies of DNA so that you end up with overlapping
fragments that you hope you can put together into the one long unique
sequence.)

Cost-wise, right now we're below 2 cents per base on the sequencing
alone; they claim this is a factor of 4  improvement.  Another factor
of 20 or so and this starts to get really interesting.  They mention
the pricepoint of $20K per patient genome as being especially
important, since that's where it starts to make sense to sequence all
or part of the genome as a diagnostic tool.

jking

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