John Clark wrote:
It took a decade and a couple of three billion dollars to find the first
human genome but it looks like this field is also following Moore's Law.
In today's New York Times Craig Venter the head of Celera had this to say:
" At the end of this year we will be able to sequence the genes and
regulatory
regions in any individual in less than a week and for under one million
dollars."
It would be sort of fun to have your own personal genome on your hard drive,
there is so much redundancy that if you turned it into a zip file it would
be
smaller than Microsoft Word.
### Actually, in a few years it might be possible to use Affymetrix
resequencing gene chips to sequence not only the genes and regulatory
regions mentioned by Venter but the whole genome (except repeats), for a few
thousands of dollars (that is, the labor involved in sequencing and chip
manufacture could be bought for that - the market price might be initially
much higher).
Affymetrix formed Perlegen, a subsidiary aiming to resequence 100 persons
for less than 10x8 $. Currently they have to use 200 to 300 chips per genome
but eventually you might have just one chip for the whole sequence.
Rafal Smigrodzki MD-PhD
Dept Neurology University of Pittsburgh
smigrodzkir@msx.upmc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:56 MDT