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 快猫短视频 (20 October 2007, p 58) last year.
Well, it鈥檚 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. 鈥淲e are committed to pushing the limits of this technology,鈥� says Shaf Yousaf of Applied Biosystems. 鈥淭hese prices will come down further in the next year or two.鈥�
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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