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Two competing companies will soon offer machines capable of sequencing a human genome in 24 hours, rather than weeks or months. On Tuesday (January 10), Illumina Inc. and Life Technologies Corp. both announced the launch of their respective machines, each capable of speed-reading a genome in a single day. And Life Technologies’ machine will do so for just $1,000 per genome, the company stated.
“It’s exciting,” said John Weinstein, chair of bioinformatics and computational biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, which currently uses Illumina machines in its core sequencing facility. “Often the scale of hours to days is critical, instead of weeks to months.” In basic research, same day genomes will shorten the time from experiment to results, said Weinstein. In ...
