DNA and You

Steven Pinker of the PGP in the NY Times Magazine

Very interesting article by Steven Pinker of the Personal Genome Project in the NY Times Magazine.  Check it out here.

High Throughput Sequencing, Moore's Law, The Next Generation, and Storage Options

It will be interesting to see if DNA sequencing technology continues to follow a Moore's law-like trajectory over the coming decades.  Clearly, next generation technologies are going to have a massive impact both in the research setting and on medical resequencing. 

Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science wrote a nice piece on the technological advances leading to the current generation of high-throughput sequencers and also the next generation: Pacific Biosciences and Helicos.

Also notable is a post from the always excellent Daniel MacArthur at Genetic Future on options for storage of personal genome sequences.

More NEJM Genomics: High-Throughput Sequencing Utilized to Identify a New Arenavirus in Transplant-Associated Infections

In a new paper by Gustavo Palacios and colleagues published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the 454 Life Sciences (Roche) high-throughput sequencing platform was utilized to investigate the cause of a fatal febrile illness in three patients who died about a month after receiving transplanted organs from the same donor (abstract here).  This approach allowed the identification of a new arenavirus transmitted through solid-organ transplantation that is likely responsible for the fatal infections in these transplant recipients.  An accompanying editorial (available to subscribers only) points out that the application of high-throughput sequencing technologies may transform the clinical microbiology lab.  Dr. Richard Whitley suggests several clinical conditions caused by infectious diseases that may be particularly amenable to a high-throughput sequencing diagnostic approach: particularly central nervous system encephalitis and acute respiratory tract infections.