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Human genetics

Dr Watson's base pairs

Nature volume 452, pages 819–820 (2008)Cite this article

The application of new technology to sequence the genome of an individual yields few biological insights. Nonetheless, the feat heralds an era of 'personal genomics' based on cheap sequencing.

Technically, the paper's interest stems from its reliance on a DNA-sequencing platform that differs greatly from the one used during the first great era of genome sequencing, which culminated in the Human Genome Project (HGP). In the HGP platform, each kilobase-pair fragment of genomic DNA was captured as a bacterial 'clone' using recombinant-DNA techniques and processed in its own microlitre-scale well in a microtitre plate. Following a series of biochemical steps, each sample was analysed electrophoretically in a dedicated, metre-long glass capillary. To achieve the required redundancy in sequence coverage, investigators in the HGP processed tens of millions of individual samples en route to determining the order of the 3 billion base pairs present in a single, composite instance of the human genome. This achievement required the development of industrial-scale genome centres that looked more like manufacturing plants than laboratories. The data-production costs alone were hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maynard V. Olson is in the Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington 98195-7720, USA. mvo@u.washington.edu,

    Maynard V. Olson

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  1. Maynard V. Olson
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Olson, M. Dr Watson's base pairs. Nature 452, 819–820 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/452819a

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