[ExI] Basically, DNA is a computing problem
Joao Magalhaes
joao at genetics.med.harvard.edu
Sun Mar 2 20:35:46 UTC 2008
The new generation sequencing technologies don't require electrophoresis:
http://www.illumina.com/pages.ilmn?ID=203
They do require a scaffold reference genome for alignment of all the reads.
Cheers,
Joao Pedro
At 18:27 01-03-2008, you wrote:
>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/
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---
Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, PhD
Harvard Medical School, Dept. of Genetics
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, NRB 238 (Church lab)
Boston, MA 02115
Telephone: 1-617-432-6512
http://www.senescence.info
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