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PARIS: Sequencing the first human genome cost billions and required an army of scientists, but now a trio of researchers in the United States have matched that feat for the price of a mid-range BMW.
"This can be done in one lab, with one machine, and at a modest cost" of about US$50,000 dollars (A$59,0000), said Stanford University professor Stephen Quake, who designed the study and lent his DNA for the task.
We’ve come a long way
At the close of the 20th century, piecing together a complete map of a genome – the blueprint of human life itself spread across three billion pairs of molecules – was the all-consuming Manhattan Project of biotechnology.
The achievement, unveiled in draft form in 2001 and finished in 2003, was hailed as one of humanity's major scientific achievements.
Since then, sequencing "has become an order of magnitude cheaper and faster" every couple of years, said Lynda Chin, a medical researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, USA.
In 2007, the firm 454 Life Sciences did it in less than three months and for less than a million dollars. In September that year, scientific maverick Craig Venter published his own complete DNA code, the first of a single individual rather than an amalgam from multiple sources. Cost: not disclosed.
Becoming commonplace
Last year, the price dropped to a quarter of a million, but still needed the input of dozens of experts. The new breakthrough, reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology this week, has become the latest benchmark.
Even if only a dozen or so individual genomes have been sequenced to date, the process is on the verge of becoming commonplace and could, within a few years, cost even ten times less.
One biotech start-up, Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, California, vows that by 2013 it will be able to unpack a complete DNA in a quarter of an hour for under a thousand dollars.
A legion of potential applications are driving the research, ranging from "personalised medicine" tailored to your genetic profile, to exploring the earliest dawn of human evolution in the DNA of our ancestors' fossils.
Where could it lead?
The civil liberties people need to start work now on the ramifications of a world where babies are DNA profiled at birth and sensors embedded in door knobs can analyse DNA from your sweat.