The price of human genome sequencing has fallen spectacularly since the turn of the century; what then cost $100,000,000 is now promised for only $1000. This race toward zero makes even Moore's Law look like a snail's pace, but the $1000 price tag does come with a couple asterisks. For one, providers will need high demand to pay off the multi-million dollar sequencing array that makes it possible, and low demand should result in higher prices. For two, $1000 will only buy you a rough draft of your genome. On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Todd Smith writes "While some sequencing technologies claim they can produce data with errors as low at one in 10 million bases, a six billion genome sequence will still contain thousands of false positive variants." To separate the sequencing errors from the actual DNA mutations, you'll need to double-check (at least). Meanwhile, Chad Orzel cautions America about getting its billion back. Advertisements for a tax prep service claim Americans overpaid the IRS by $1,000,000,000 last year. That's about $3 per citizen, but after cutting out the young, the old, and Mitt Romney's "47% percent," Chad estimates about $48 per two-income household. So while the promise of a billion dollars may lure in new customers, the vast majority of them will not come out ahead.
Recalculating Round Numbers
No more delays! BLAST away!
Time to blast. Let's see what it means for sequences to be similar.
First, we'll plan our experiment. When I think about digital biology experiments, I organize the steps in the following way:
Shotgun sequencing refers to the process whereby a genome is sequenced and assembled with no prior information regarding the genomic location of any of the DNA we sequence. There are quite a few steps that you have to go through before you have an assembled genome sequence.
A few weeks back, we published a review about the development and role of the human reference genome. A key point of the reference genome is that it is not a single sequence.
What tells us that this new form of H1N1 is swine flu and not regular old human flu or avian flu?
If we had a lab, we might use antibodies, but when you're a digital biologist, you use a computer.