If genomes are going to revolutionize personalized medicine, the first step will be sequencing the genome accurately.
It bears repeating just how far this tech has come: the price of sequencing a genome is rapidly coming down, as is the time it takes to do a sequence. It’s getting so easy that the price point is already well within the means of many middle class Americans, and the technology might soon prove useful enough to save lives.
But with roughly six billion base pairs in the human genome, creating a truly accurate gene sequence is no easy task. Even the best sequencing techniques can have an error rate around 1 percent, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of errors.
Read the full, original story: If We Can’t Get Genome Accuracy Right, Personalized Medicine Is a Pipe Dream
Additional Resources:
- How Well Did You Sequence That Genome?, redOrbit
- 99.9 Percent Accurate Genome Sequencing, IEEE Spectrum
- Genome in a Bottle Consortium
