SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

World's longest DNA sequence decoded [bbc.com]

A team of UK scientists have claimed the record for decoding the world's longest DNA sequence. The scientists produced a DNA read that is about 10,000 times longer than normal, and twice as large as a previous record holder, from Australia. This research has kick-started an Ashes-style competition to sequence an entire chromosome in a single read. The new holder of the trophy for world's longest DNA read is a team led by Matt Loose at Nottingham University.

[...] Dr Loose's group also recently produced the most complete human genome sequence using a palm-sized "nanopore" sequencing machine. These potentially offer lower cost and faster processing for DNA sequencing. He told me: "There has been a competition running to see who can get the longest sequence. I think it is still friendly." Dr Loose went on to say: "Australia led for a while, but then we had a read just short of a million. People were then competing to beat the record, in particular to be the first person to get a million-base-pair read.

[...] Dr Loose said of the record-breaking read: "In theory, nanopore sequencing allows you to sequence any length molecule of DNA. That's really quite different to how we have been sequencing DNA for many years now. The breakthrough in this paper is that we have been able to sequence a molecule of 2.3 million bases in length, which no one has ever been able to do before.

Apparently, they have been mailing around a literal trophy.

Previously: Human Genome Sequenced With MinION Nanopore Sequencer [soylentnews.org] (same group as above)

Original Submission