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

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Is this what they call "microarrays"?

I picked up a science magazine in Tucker Hall the other day.  On its 
cover was the lead in to one of its articles "4 ways to produce better 
microarrays" (just like "10 ways to get your man to love you more" that 
you find in grocery store check out line magazines).



Jonathan King wrote:
> 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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