New Tech Promises Cheap Gene Sequencing In Minutes

Zothecula writes "Sequencing an entire genome is currently a highly complex, time-consuming process – the DNA must be broken down into segments and replicated, utilizing chemicals that destroy the original sample. Scientists from Imperial College London, however, have just announced the development of a prototype device that could lead to technology capable of sequencing a human genome within minutes, at a cost of just a few dollars. By contrast, when sequencing of the genome of Dr. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was completed in 2007, it had taken two years and cost US$1 million."

Article citation

[brteag00]

It drives me nuts when the popular media article doesn't include a citation back to the original research. Here's a link to the article on the Nano Letters website: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nl103873a [acs.org]

Sounds plausible.

[chemicaldave]

FTFA

At the heart of the Imperial College device is a silicon chip, with a 50-nanometer nanopore bored through it. DNA strands are propelled at high speed through this hole, and get their coding sequence read by a “tunneling electrode junction” as they come out the other side. This junction consists of a 2-nanometer gap between two platinum wires, with an electrical current passing between them, across the gap. The current interacts with the unique electrical signal given off by each of the DNA strand’s base codes, and the resulting data is then processed by a computer to determine the complete genome sequence. The chips are reportedly quite durable, standing up to repeated uses and washings with no loss in performance.

Doesn't sound too outrageous. I suppose this is one advantage of only two base pairs.

Not a very useful comparison

[glwtta]

By contrast, when sequencing of the genome of Dr. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was completed in 2007, it had taken two years and cost US$1 million.

Yeah, but nowadays it can be done in a few hours and costs under $10,000. May as well say that the Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost $3 billion - true, but not very relevant.

And we're well on-track for sub-$1,000 genomes in a year or two (without any new breakthrough technologies); which is basically "good enough" for research purposes. As Lincoln Stein pointed out in a recent paper, we're already almost at the point where it costs less to sequence a base pair than it does to store it for computational analysis.