In August, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) awarded $14 million in grants to support technologies that will enable rapid sequencing of a human genome for $1,000 or less by 2012. Grantees include seven university-based research groups and two companies—Electron Optica of Palo Alto, California, and Stratos Genomics of Seattle—that will undertake studies of new platforms and follow-on studies. Since 2004, NHGRI, part of the National Institutes of Health, has been spending between $18 and $22 million each year to bolster next-generation sequencing technologies, says Jeffery Schloss, program director of Technology Development Coordination at NHGRI. The goal is to ensure that genome sequencing will be easily available to researchers and healthcare providers. Technology supported by NHGRI has already brought the price down below $20,000, “but the data aren't yet of the quality we'd like to see,” says Schloss. “The question is whether researchers can improve on these things.” Many commercially successful sequencing technologies were supported by NHGRI grants at some point during development including Roche's 454, Oxford Nanopore's SOLiD, and Helicos' tSMS, says Jay Shendure, associate professor of genome sciences at University of Washington, Seattle, and a 2011 grant recipient. “This is a great example of the NIH supporting risky, innovative work that is explicitly technology development and also an example of how those bets can pay off.”