A new type of technology has sequenced the human genome in a month and reagents is less than $ 50,000, according to a report released today in Nature Biotechnology . But this step, the quick cheap genomes does not mean the end for large sequencing centers.
human genomes produced to date all need many instruments operated in parallel and cost up to $ 500,000 per genome, said Stephen Quake, a biophysicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and founder of Helicos Biosciences of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The HeliScope Single Molecule Sequencer is the first instrument of commercial single molecule sequencing, so called because it does not require the production of millions of copies of target DNA for analysis. Instead, the DNA is cut into small pieces and mounted at very high densities in a flow cell where a highly sensitive camera monitors step by addition of the base step for each sequencing reaction.
The demonstration provides "plug and play" a sequencing closer to reality step, in which individual laboratories will be able to do what is now done primarily in large sequencing centers. "This is the main party of the outgoing Helicos machine," says Jeffery Schloss of the National Institute for Research on the human genome in Bethesda, Maryland.
However, the machines cost $ 1 million. That's several times the price of other sequencing machines, says Schloss. Although these machines hint at a future where individual laboratories sequencing large genomes, Schloss stresses that the main centers continue to play a role in improving technologies and their uses and to develop analytical tools for genome projects
Photo credit:. S. Quake / Stanford
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