Sequencing entire genome of any species just cracked the $10,000 barrier

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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.

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.

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.”

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

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia.

 

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