Calvin College Developmental Cell Biologist Steve Matheson points to an interesting series of papers highlighting the importance of new rapid-fire DNA sequencing technologies for the study of evolution.
The “$1,000 Genome” has been in the news a great deal from a health care perspective: the advances in sequencing technology have brought the cost of sequencing whole genomes down to just a fraction of what they were when Francis Collins began the laborious sequencing of the Human Genome back in the early 1990s. See, for example, the new book by Kevin Davies of Bio-IT World.
In a matter of a few years (if not months), you and I will be able to get our complete genome sequenced for the cost of a night out at a decent restaurant.
Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies have high hopes for the kind of therapies that can be developed in response to what we learn cumulatively from thousands of people’s genomes about the genes that predispose an individual to diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Diabetes.The “$1,000 Genome” has been in the news a great deal from a health care perspective: the advances in sequencing technology have brought the cost of sequencing whole genomes down to just a fraction of what they were when Francis Collins began the laborious sequencing of the Human Genome back in the early 1990s. See, for example, the new book by Kevin Davies of Bio-IT World.
In a matter of a few years (if not months), you and I will be able to get our complete genome sequenced for the cost of a night out at a decent restaurant.
But the same technology, as Matheson’s essay helps to illustrate, is also shedding new light on questions of evolution and fitness that have intrigued scientists ever since Darwin. In that sense, the more we move forward, the more we learn from the past.
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