Invited Paper BI-WeA2
Genome Sequencing with Polony Technology

Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 2:00 pm, Room 609

The resounding success of the Human Genome Project (HGP) clearly illustrates how early investments in developing cost-effective methods of biological data acquisition can have tremendous payoffs for the biomedical community. Over the course of a decade, through refinement, parallelization, and automation of established sequencing technologies, the HGP motivated a 100-fold reduction of sequencing costs, from $10 per finished base to $0.10 per finished base. The relevance and utility of sequencing and sequencing centers in the wake of the HGP has been a subject of recent debate, however, I maintain that the completion of the human genome marks the end-of-the-beginning, rather than the beginning-of-the-end, of the era of DNA sequencing and, more generally, the era of nucleic-acid (NA) technologies. For a wide range of biomedical goals, a strong need is evolving for low-cost NA technology, and I will describe our progress in using polony technology to cheaply and rapidly re-sequence a human genome. The list of realized and potential applications for this type of high-throughput sequencing technology is rich and growing.