Gene Sequencing for the Masses
April 30, 2008 | Source: Technology Review
The Polonator, an inexpensive ($150,000) sequencing machine developed by George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School and by Danaher Motion, is due to hit the market in May.
Millions of beads coated with small fragments of the DNA to be sequenced are spread on a glass slide. Next, a series of fluorescently labeled DNA bases bind to the fragments. Finally, a standard fluorescence microscope reveals which base is at each position on a fragment. (Danaher Motion-Dover)
Developed with an “open source” philosophy, its creators hope that it will make sequencing more common, ultimately giving a boost to personalized medicine. The technology will become an integral part of Church’s Personal Genome Project, an effort to enable personalized medicine by providing a test bed for new genomics technologies and analytic tools.
The device is a commercial version of the polony sequencing approach developed in Church’s lab over the past 10 years.
