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Nanopore DNA Sequencing
mindpixel writes: "Harvard scientists have concieved a revolutionary technology for probing, and eventually sequencing, individual DNA molecules using single-channel recording techniques. The technique essentially pulls a single strand of DNA through a nanopore, reading off the individual bases electrically. The technique could allow for decoding of a person's genome in hours instead of years." While the sequencing in hours instead of years is something that's pretty darn cool, our holdup in using this data is actually now what the genes are, and how they interact. That will still take years for us to figure out.
But it is a place to start.
Side note:
while looking up the Finnish Language pages for this comment, I came across this tidbit: That Finnish has "no equivalent of the verb to have". This has interesting philosophic implications in the history of open source, etc.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Yeah. Sure, i agree with you. Once youve taken DNA out of the nucleus and stripped out the protein complement of chromatin, it is darn hard to get high-quality genomic DNA (for PFGE or whatever). Furthermore, yanking the DNA through that little hole is gonna probably cause problems.
However, you dont need unfragmented DNA. For example, you could fragment genomic DNA, and pieces of this would randomly pass through the pore - essentially a shotgun approach. This wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. This would also get round problems with the detection mechanism. For example, if they could only disringuish between C/T with 80% accuracy, multiple reads of the same sequence could clear this up.
The technology could also overcome problems such as cloning bias, problems with sequencing microsats (e.g. (AT)n), GC rich regions etc. Which the HGMP is still having problems with.
I am a zoological systematist, working in entomology.
The human genomes was sequenced by taking lots of DNA, cutting it up randomly sequencing the random pieces of cut up DNA.
In my field, we work with much smaller amounts of DNA. Sometimes I only have a single specimen of a tiny insect, or unique material (from rare or extinct species) to try and get some DNA out of. In older material, DNA is usually degraded and many times we end up with nothing but a destroyed or damaged specimen.
With small amounts of DNA to begin with, we have to amplify (PCR) single genes or regions by using general primers, which means that they don't only fit on the insect DNA, but fungi and human DNA too, making contamination of your material very real risk.
If this technology turns out to work on a larger scale, it's amazing news for me and my collegues.
The nanopore technolgy sequences single moleculer, which means the PCR step becomes unneccesary! This means that we can get sequences from specimens with severely degrades DNA, and we don't have to be as afraid of grinding up rare material in hope of getting sequences.