On September 16, 2011, Richard Resnick in his TED talk revealed that genome sequencing is now so cheap and fast it will open up opportunities for personalised genome sequencing for health care, insurance and politics!
“Now what we do is we take a genome, we make maybe 50 copies of it, we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads, and then we sequence them, massively parallel. And then we bring that into software, and we reassemble it, and we tell you what the story is.”
The Human Genome Project sequenced 3 gigabases which took 15 years, now one run on a modern machine can process 200 gigabases in a week, and that capacity is increasing and now the price of sequencing a base has fallen 100 million times!
With a world wide capacity to sequence human genomes is 50-100 thousand per year, in 2011 and the one lab that represents 20% of all the global capacity is the Bejing Genomics Institute (BGI) in China.
[BGI provided 10 million COVID-19 PCR test kits to Australia. It is known that the Chinese are building a DNA profiling database for genomic surveillance, which is of great concern for Australians.]
There is still much to learn about the human genome and genetic material. In March 2022 the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome revealed there are hidden regions! “These unresolved regions include segmental duplications, ribosomal rRNA gene arrays, and satellite arrays that harbor unexplored variation of unknown consequence” [1]