DNA and You

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.