Genetic Big Data: What It Means

Researchers finished the first draft of the human genome in the year 2000. Although the decreasing cost of the technology has far outpaced Moore’s Law since then, we have yet to fully leverage all that new information to make it really useful. In a wide ranging talk on his work, from transcribing the first complete human genome to building synthetic life forms, genomic pioneer Craig Venter confessed he was disappointed that genomics has taken as long as it has to scale up. “We just got to the starting line,” Venter said, speaking at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference. “Hopefully it won’t take as long to get through it as it took to get started.” What’s changed? Earlier this year, genomic sequencing company, Illumina, announced a new sequencing system that can produce 18,000 high quality human genomes per year at $1,000 per genome -- a mark dreamed of for over a decade. Venter’s new venture, Human Longevity, Inc., purchased two of Illumina’s new sequencers with the aim of ramping up to some 40,000 genomes a year. When asked what’s coming in the next five years, Venter quipped that predicting the future is hard unless you’re an investor, but he thinks a big acceleration is in the cards. “[We’re going to go] from zero to a thousand miles an hour very quickly.” Whereas we’ve sequenced around 225,000 genomes worldwide to date, Venter estimates we’ll have sequenced something like 20 times that total in only a third of ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news