Grapefruit-sized DNA sequencer in development
With funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, researchers at Reveo, Inc. and the University of Washington are collaborating on developing a grapefruit-sized sequencer. It uses electronic and photonic effects rather than liquid chemistry and could potentially sequence an entire genome for pennies.
In 2002, Godfray recognized that “in 10 or 20 years time it will be simpler to take an individual organism and get enough sequence data to assign it to a “sequence cluster” (equivalent to species) than to key it down using traditional methods” (Godfray 2002 Nature 417:17). That future is getting closer.
Here is your sequencer, sir
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
[…] In current Systematic Biology 55:844 (not open access so no article link here), three worried taxonomists opine that DNA barcoding won’t work because it’s too expensive. This is likely incorrect. Any process involving electronics and/or chemicals is likely to become faster, cheaper, and smaller, perhaps dramatically so. Just as with GPS, lowered costs increase use, and increased use helps lower costs. On the DNA front, researchers are developing microfluidic grapefruit-sized sequencers that analyze sub-femtomole quantities of DNA in nanoliter volumes, with proportionally reduced reagents costs. Alternative technologies such as pyrosequencing may be even faster and cheaper. […]