DNA SEQUENCING FORGES AHEAD

THE FIRST human genome sequence cost more than $2 billion and took about a decade to complete. Achieving the milestone of the billionth base sequenced in the 3 billion-base-pair human genome was a cause for celebration. Since the end of the Human Genome Project in 2003, cost and time barriers in sequencing methods have been shattered multiple times, and they keep getting lower. Technology has now advanced to the point that sequencing a genome can take less than a month and with some platforms, less than a week. Sequencing a billion bases is now the work of a single day. And the cost? Depending on the platform and whom you ask, reagents to sequence a billion bases now run as little as $5,000, although instrumentation, facility, and personnel costs must be added to that. The technological improvements and plummeting costs of sequencing are paving the way for whole-genome sequencing for research purposes and, ultimately, ...