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New Method To Revolutionize DNA Sequencing
An anonymous reader writes "A new method of DNA sequencing published this week in Science identifies incorporation of single bases by fluorescence. This has been shown to increase read lengths from 20 bases (454 sequencing) to >4000 bases, with a 99.3% accuracy. Single molecule reading can reduce costs and increase the rate at which reads can be performed. 'So far, the team has built a chip housing 3000 ZMWs [waveguides], which the company hopes will hit the market in 2010. By 2013, it aims to squeeze a million ZMWs [waveguides] onto a single chip and observe DNA being assembled in each simultaneously. Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000.'"
It's common practice in bioinformatics to measure the same data repetitively in an effort to reduce the error. While 0.993 isn't very good, (0.993)^3 is pretty awsome. In practice, the errors might be correlated (as in a flaw in the measuring system), so the benefit of re-measuring might not be exponential...however it should be darn close.
One in 10E8 is the DNA base-pair copy error rate. Even so thats around 60 when a sperm meets egg. Another much more when there a trillion somatic cells dividing on average 50 times each in a human lifetime. The vast majority are errors are neutral, but accumulating ten or so specifically unluckly ones in a cell may be a cancer.