WHEN the cost of sequencing a human genome gets down to the price of a family car, then the era of personalised genomics will truly be upon us. This was the prediction from James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, in an interview with ΒιΆΉ΄«Γ½ (20 October 2007, p 58) last year.
Well, itβs getting close. Last week, Applied Biosystems of Foster City, California, announced that it had sequenced the genome of a Nigerian man at a cost of less than $60,000, excluding labour. βWe are committed to pushing the limits of this technology,β says Shaf Yousaf of Applied Biosystems. βThese prices will come down further in the next year or two.β
Several companies are already offering partial personal-genome scans, based on single-letter changes in parts of the genome, for about $1000. Cheap full-genome sequencing would help us to understand why people differ from others, and could help determine whether someone was at risk of a particular disease.
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