October 21, 2007
Orders Of Magnitude Advances In DNA Sequencing Technologies

An article in The Scientist provides a sense of how much DNA sequencing costs have fallen. At the bottom of that page they show 3 costs from 3 different sequencing instruments for doing a sequencing of the Drosophila fly genome. The established ABI 3730 has a sequencing cost for this job of $650,000. The 454 Life Sciences instrument costs $132,000 for the same job. Big cut in cost, right? But if you paid $132,000 you paid too much. Using the Solexa instrument costs $12,500 for the same job. Wow.

The article states that each of these instruments are more appropriate for different classes of problems. For example, RNA sequencing is one kind of problem and the article reports on a huge advance in how much RNA sequencing one MIT lab can now do with newer machines:

David Bartel at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and colleagues have been using new sequencing technologies to investigate new classes of small RNAs. With standard sequencing in 2003, Bartel says he was happy to get 4,000 RNAs sequenced. In 2006, using 454 sequencing he could get 400,000, and this year, using the Solexa instrument, he'll get 50 million.

So Bartel is getting 4 orders of magnitude more data per year over just 4 years time. He can ask questions and look for answers in areas that were totally beyond his reach just 4 years ago. Of course 4 years from now he'll be able to ask still more questions he can't ask now and get answers at an even faster rate. This pattern of advance makes me very optimistic about how much scientists and bioengineers will be able to accomplish in 10 and 20 years time. These tools have become so powerful because they've become smaller. The pattern is very similar to the pattern we see in the computer industry. Successive waves of technology become smaller, faster, cheaper, more powerful.

When do these advances reach a point where, say, stem cell manipulation to produce useful therapies becomes really easy? There's a point on the road ahead where therapies we can only dream about today become easy to create. Once we can produce replacement parts using cell therapies and organs grown in vats full body rejuvenation (with the unfortunate exception of the brain) will be within reach. We'll also need really excellent gene therapies to take on the more difficult task of brain rejuvenation. Though cell therapies will still deliver benefits to the brain, for example in the form of rejuvenated blood vessels.

Share |      Randall Parker, 2007 October 21 02:02 PM  Biotech Advance Rates


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