In August, the US Patent and Trademark Office (Washington, DC) granted Sequenom (San Diego, CA and Hamburg, Germany) a patent on technology that should protect Sequenom's methods for rapid sequencing of DNA by mass spectrometry. The patent covers DNA amplification and base-specific termination conducted simultaneously in one reaction vessel. According to the company's president and CEO, Hubert Koster, the invention allows fast and accurate sequencing data from small amounts of template. It will facilitate the industrialization of genetic analysis, he says, by permitting researchers to avoid time-consuming sample preparation and amplification steps. A week before the patent was announced, PerSeptive Biosystems Division of PE Biosystems (Framingham, MA) agreed to supply Sequenom customers with MALDI-TOF mass spectrometers for the high-throughput analysis of its miniaturized DNA arrays.