BioIT-World recently ran an article on GATC Biotech, a German sequencing provider that is the first commercial outfit in the world to offer all three next generation sequencing platforms (454,SOLID, Solexa).
In the article, CEO Peter Pohl made this interesting remark regarding the impact that NGS is having on the price of commercial sequencing services:
Back in 1990, Pohl says cost of sequencing a base pair was $25. “Today, the cost per base pair is definitely less than 0.1 cent/base pair. This is 30,000 times less than just 16 years ago! If we look forward another 16 years, we come to a price for onefold coverage of a human genome of [about $99].
Cokus et al. have just published a Nature paper on shotgun bisulphite sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome. The analysis was performed by combining bisulphite treatment of genomic DNA with ultra-high-throughput sequencing using the Illumina 1G Genome Analyser and Solexa sequencing technology. The authors named this approach BS-Seq, and state that it enabled them to “describe methylation on previously inaccessible components of the genome and analyse the DNA methylation sequence composition and distribution”
A new publication by Vera et al. describes the sequencing and assembly of a large number of expressed sequence tags from the Glanville fritillary butterfly.
The authors conclude that there is good new for the species that are not in the current genomics limelight , as…
454 sequencing, when performed to provide sufficient coverage depth, allows de novo transcriptome assembly and a fast, cost-effective, and reliable method for development of functional genomic tools for nonmodel species.
A recently published study by Wommack et al. explores the power of using pyrosequencing data to characterize microbial communities. Short reads here refers to pyrosequencing data, as compared to Sanger sequencing data.
In the abstract the authors conclude that:
..more distant homologs of microbial and viral genes are not detected by short read sequences…. ..Noting the current limitation in computational approaches for analysis of short sequences, use of short read length libraries does not appear to be an appropriate tool for metagenomic characterization of microbial communities.
According to GenomeWeb, The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research are releasing generous funding for research into the role of microbes in human oral health and disease using metagenomic approaches.
Research will target the total oral microbial community using metagenomic approaches built upon recent developments in DNA sequencing, gene assembly, and bioinformatics and the goal is to completely characterize all microbes and their genes in the oral environment - including bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and parasites.
