In 2003, the US Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health announced that—13 years and $2.7 billion later—they had finally finished mapping the human genome.
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In a paper published (paywall) in Science on March 23, researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University said they have figured a way to sequence the entirety of any genome for just $10,000, in a couple of weeks. Their test project? Re-sequencing the DNA of the mosquito species that spreads the Zika virus.
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Researchers hope that this technique will go beyond human patients and mosquitoes. “Because the genome is generated from scratch, 3D assembly can be applied to a wide array of species, from grizzly bears to tomato plants,” Erez Lieberman Aiden, a geneticist at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “And it is pretty easy.”
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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Scientists just changed the way we build genomes to make them 270,000 times cheaper
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