Next Generation Sequencing

I once had the pleasure of visiting David Lambert, an expert and pioneer in ancient DNA studies. With Dave I had some of the most interesting and thought provoking discussion about biology, that I have ever had.

Now Dave and his colleagues have a new review out in TREE on New developments in ancient genomics that I can’t wait to read when I get back to work next week.

Here is the abstract:

Ancient DNA research is on the crest of a ‘third wave’ of progress due to the introduction of a new generation of DNA sequencing technologies. Here we review the advantages and disadvantages of the four new DNA sequencers that are becoming available to researchers. These machines now allow the recovery of orders of magnitude more DNA sequence data, albeit as short sequence reads. Hence, the potential reassembly of complete ancient genomes seems imminent, and when used to screen libraries of ancient sequences, these methods are cost effective. This new wealth of data is also likely to herald investigations into the functional properties of extinct genes and gene complexes and will improve our understanding of the biological basis of extinct phenotypes.

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine sequenced the genome of James D. Watson.
It took them 2 months and 234 sequence runs on a 454 GS FLX System to complete this task. They found 29 Mb of sequence to be absent from the reference genome containing several new genes.

You can find the details in this Nature paper.

A new paper in The New England Journal of Medicine makes the case that the medical field and the public will not be ready to deal with the implications of consumer genomics until more translational medicine connects information from the vast amount of genome-wide association data to personal genomes in meaningful ways. Paper in The New England Journal of Medicine.