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Stanford Professor Sequences His Genome in Just One Week

by Caleb Johnson on August 11, 2009 at 01:18 PM

Reading an entire novel is often considered a nice week's accomplishment, but a Stanford University professor has put that idea to shame. In just seven days, he mapped his entire DNA.

According to an AP story on the Denver Post's Web site, bioengineering professor Stephen Quake, PhD, announced yesterday that he'd sequenced his genome in just one week, using only one machine and drawing on less than $50,000 in funds. When you consider the fact that the same task took the Human Genome Project 13 years and about $300 million, it's easy to understand how Quake's accomplishment could shake up the scientific community. He told the Stanford University News, "This can now be done in one lab, with one machine, at a modest cost."

The professor's results give hope that gene sequencing will soon be available to more people, potentially leading to customized disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment based on a person's genetic code. As of now, only a few peoples' DNA have been sequenced.

But don't run to your local university or hospital and ask to have your genes sequenced just yet. The machine Quake used costs $1 million, and he determined the average cost of a scan would be about $48,000. Also, Quake's machine only captures about 95-percent of the DNA, which some colleagues say isn't quite good enough. Despite the remaining hurdles, this news is cause for celebration (and for making us regular folks rethink our plans for the week). [From: AP/Denver Post and Stanford University]

Tags: bioengineering, biology, dna, genome, professor, science, stanford, top

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