Many of the unsequenced gaps in the human genome arise because their DNA sequences cannot be read by the bacteria used in traditional sequencing methods, according to a linkurl:paper;http://genomebiology.com/2009/10/6/R60 published last week in __Genome Biology__. In the paper, a team of Broad Institute researchers report a simple, new way to fill in those gaps using next-generation sequencing technology.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
"There are some regions of the genome which bacteria don't like," linkurl:Lincoln Stein,;http://www.oicr.on.ca/Research/stein.htm a bioinformatician at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto who was not involved in the research, told __The Scientist__. "Those have been unsequenceable until recently when the next generation of sequencing machines, which do not require a cloning step, became available." The human genome was declared "finished" nearly a decade ago, but the 3 billion nucleotide sequence is still riddled with holes. Broad computational biologist linkurl:Manuel Garber;http://broad.harvard.edu/compbio/team.html and his colleagues set out to fix...




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