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."

Comments

Re:but

[oldspewey]

No, but it can identify the gene for compulsive behaviour.

Bert & Ernie?

[jfengel]

I can't get too enthused about a prototype of something that might one day lead to another prototype, "up to ten years away".

But the article in the sidebar titled "Breakthrough raises possibility of genetic children for same-sex couples" is at least amusingly illustrated with a picture of Bert and Ernie.

Re:but

[ColdWetDog]

can it sequence as fast as slashdotters can claim first post?

Nope, but it is following an exponential cost curve. Get it cheap, get it fast, hook it to some truly impressive computing technology to make some sense out of it and you've got?

1984 looking like the Elysian fields? Paradise? Something in between?

As the old Chinese curse goes "May you live in interesting times".

Re:let's hope

[Monkeedude1212]

You know what they say... In Space, no one can hear you complain about Science Fiction.

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

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.

Moore's Law of DNA

[Fractal Dice]

Ignoring any one specific advance in technology, the cost per base pair of sequencing DNA has dropping exponentially. The cost to sequence an entire human genome has gone from billions of dollars in 1990 to about $40,000 in 2010. By 2015, it will probably cross the $1000 barrier.

By 2020, it will likely be under $100 - at which point it might as well be a standard part of a person's medical file.

By 2030, it could under $1 - amateur biologists could start collecting genomes like poleroids while hiking.

By 2040, it could be a fraction of penny - cough on a sensor, get a readout of all the microbes in your lungs, what strain they are and, by looking at the specific mutations between generations and comparing to a database of everyone else's microbes, the likely person who infected you.

Re:Moore's Law of DNA

[brteag00]

I don't argue that the cost-per-base of sequence is dropping dramatically - but comparing the output of an Illumina sequencer (the tens-of-thousands of dollars pricepoint) to the Human Genome Project is misleading. The reason the HGP cost so much is the quality of the reference sequence they produced - the so-called Bermuda standard, of one error in 10,000 bases. The HGP researchers assembled all those individual sequence reads into an almost unbroken reference of astounding quality and utility.

In comparison, the sequence data people are producing today is crap. The individual reads are 30-80 base pairs and get put together into contiguous runs of only several thousand bases of length, on average. This is good for some kinds of work, but it doesn't give nearly the same picture of the genome that made the original human genome sequence such a masterpiece.

(I'm a genomics grad student. Can you tell?)

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.