Opening of New Vista in the Genomic World: Genomic Sequence of James Watson
The 17th April issue of Nature publishes a mind boggling article captioned, “The complete genome of an individual by massively parallel DNA".
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It took two months to complete the sequence of the legendary figure, James D. Watson.
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Using picoliter-size reaction vessels, massively parallel sequencing method was followed.
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The redundancy was 7.4 fold.
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As compared to US$ 100 million, the current method using 454 technology was only US$ one million.
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3.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified. Instances of amino-acid substitution within the coding sequence were found to be 10,654.
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The number of small-scale base pair (bp) insertions and deletion polymorphisms varied from 2–40,000, while the variation in the large scale gain and loss of chromosomal segments was in the range from 26,000 to 1.5 million bp.
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The results obtained in this method which is astonishingly faster and 100 times cheaper are in agreement with those reported by traditional methods.
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Compared to random shotgun sequencing method in which bacterial cloning is used, there is no arbitrary loss of genomic sequences in the second generation technology because the amplification of DNA occurs in a cell-free system.
The authors describe their results which is first of its kind to be, “a pilot for the future challenges of 'personalized genome sequencing,'
