Sequencing technologies — the next generation

Following up on last week's coverage of the Genotyping Portal, check out this new review article on next-generation sequencing in Nature Reviews Genetics.  One major focus of this paper is that the next generation of sequencing platforms each use fundamentally different technologies.  Because of this, it's likely that multiple platforms will coexist in the marketplace, and different platforms will have clear advantages over others for particular biological applications.  The paper has some nice figures illustrating how the technology works in sequencing by reversible terminators used by Illumina/Solexa and Helicos BioSciences, emulsion PCR used by Life/APG's SOLiD ligation platform and the Roche/454 Pyrosequencing system, and the highly-anticipated real-time single-molecule sequencing from Pacific Biosciences.  Finally, there's a table giving the pros, cons, biological applications, cost, read length, run time, and references for each of the next-gen sequencing applications.  Finally, a revealing piece of information I found in the last table showing sequencing statistics on personal genomes shows that the sequencing of Stephen Quake's genome with Helicos a few months ago cost only $48,000, a decrease of several orders of magnitude compared to the sequencing of J. Craig Venter's genome (Sanger), which cost an estimated $70,000,000 just a few years ago.

The author of the paper, Michael L. Metzker, is an associate professor of genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, a senior manager at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor, and President & CEO of LaserGen, Inc., Houston, TX.

Sequencing Technologies - The Next Generation (NRG AOP)