[ExI] Basically, DNA is a computing problem

[Bryan Bishop]

On Saturday 01 March 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> A modern sequencer itself is a fairly powerful computer. The new
> machines being brought online at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
> are robots from waist-height upwards, where the machinery grows and
> then treats microscopic specks of DNA in serried ranks so that a
> laser can illuminate it and a moving camera capture the fluorescing
> bases every two seconds. The lower half of each cabinet holds the
> computers needed to coordinate the machinery and do the preliminary
> processing of the camera pictures. At the heart of the machine is a
> plate of treated glass about the size of an ordinary microscope
> slide, which contains around 30m copies of 2,640 tiny fragments of
> DNA, all arranged in eight lines along the glass, and all with the
> bases at their tips being directly read off by a laser.

It is my understanding that it is a bit more complicated than that, not 
just fluorescent laser spectroscopy, but rather some sort of gel 
electrophoresis system where the DNA strands are ran down all at once 
and then you correlate massive datasets together to figure out where 
all of the DNA molecules were in synch or where they weren't, and stuff 
like that. I'd like to be wrong - I hope it's as easy as a laser 
reading each individual nucleotide reporter.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/