Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 20 November 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1245
News
Human genomes in minutes?
Not yet, but biotechnology company is on track for 2013.
A much-watched Silicon Valley company has published a proof of concept for its DNA-sequencing technology, which it hopes will one day be going through entire human genomes in minutes.
Pacific Biosciences of Menlo Park, California, reports today that it can generate continuous stretches of DNA sequence up to thousands of base pairs long.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
It is inevitable that the time and cost of sequencing our genomes will come down. Eventually we will be able to get our genomes sequenced in a matter of seconds for less than a hundred dollars. Sequencing is not the same as reading and interpreting our individual codes of life but this will greatly help in that endeavour. Eventually we will be able to take "the sorry state of things entire and remould them closer to the hearts desire".