This will be pushed from 100 base pairs now to 400 next year, Life says.
Last week, Celera announced it had delivered 1.2 billion base pairs of the humane genome sequence to its subscribers.
Organisms with more than the standard two base pairs would be able to make more than the standard 20 amino acids.
Why there are only two base pairs is an open question, and one which evolutionary biologists and geneticists want to answer.
Codon's founders brought with them new ways to catch errors in DNA synthesis, allowing them to produce much larger strings of base pairs.
Many small gaps remain, and these complicate still further the job of identifying genes by looking directly at the sequence of base pairs.
ECONOMIST: The ��book of life�� may be missing half of its words
And some parts, particularly those where the same short pattern of base pairs is repeated over and over again, remain difficult to sequence well.
ECONOMIST: A new prize for the genomics of the elderly is now on offer
All you need then is a powerful computer program to match up the overlaps, and you can reconstruct the original order of the base pairs.
Other unnatural base pairs have been made before, notably by a Japanese group led by Shigeyuki Yokoyama, now at the Genomic Sciences Centre in Saitama.
Codon recently shipped the biggest piece of DNA ever made, a hunk of 35, 000 base pairs, big enough to hold ten genes, to Cambridge biotech Microbia.
The winners will have to do it accurately, making no more than one mistake per million base pairs (the chemical letters in which genomic information is encoded).
ECONOMIST: A new prize for the genomics of the elderly is now on offer
It is so long, though, that if the 3 billion base pairs were linked together and pulled out straight, the result would be a metre in extent.
ECONOMIST: Genomics has not yet delivered the drugs, but it will
The whole process takes just 30 seconds, and the device is able to handle DNA strands up to 200, 000 base pairs long, says Eugene Chan, the company's CEO.
The full genome has 6 billion base pairs (3 billion from each parent, though many are duplicates), which means even the prize winner will be allowed 6, 000 mistakes.
ECONOMIST: A new prize for the genomics of the elderly is now on offer
That might help evolutionary biologists answer the question of why, for billions of years, and in every form of life on earth, only two base pairs are used.
Imagine subjecting Shakespeare to a computational process like bioinformatics--not to chop the poor guy into DNA base pairs but to tease out 1, 000-word pieces (or strings) of his plays.
The company also says it will introduce a new semiconductor chip that will increase the number of base pairs its machine can read out in one two hour run to 1 billion.
Embedded in each set of 23 chromosomes are 3 billion base pairs of DNA, known by the letters A, T, C and G, for the chemical bases adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine.
Wherever the stock market may journey, U.S. output of silicon logic gates, lines of software code, terabits of Web traffic and base pairs of genes sequenced is going to keep right on growing.
For an era of targeted therapies, Private Health runs a full battery of molecular diagnostics "to sequence the entire three billion base pairs of somebody's DNA in a couple of hours, " Mr. Michelson marvels.
WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Leslie Michelson: Doctor to the 1% (and Maybe Someday to You)
The whole process takes just 30 seconds, and the device is able to handle DNA strands up to 200, 000 base pairs long, says Chief Executive Eugene Chan , who founded the company in 1997 while attending Harvard Medical School.
The human genome project itself, which was the enabling factor of this revolution, was perfectly exponential with the number of base pairs being sequenced doubling every year and the cost per base pair coming down by half every year.
FORBES: Health and Medicine at the Inflection Point--Today's Perspective from Ray Kurzweil
Both are digital systems, in which words or base pairs are recombined to make an infinite possibility of messages. (Elsewhere I once noted the numerical similarity between Shakespeare's vocabulary of about 20, 000 distinct words and his genome of about 21, 000 genes).
WSJ: Matt Ridley on the Ideas in Mark Pagel's Wired for Culture | Mind & Matter
The 2010 National Medal Science to Jacqueline K. Barton, California Institute of Technology, for discovery of a new property of the DNA helix long-range electron transfer, and for showing that electron transfer depends upon stacking of the base pairs and DNA dynamics.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama Honors the Country��s Top Innovators and Scientists | The White House
The Swedish team, with help from researchers at the University of Copenhagen, sequenced tens of thousands of base pairs from across the genome of the farm woman, going beyond earlier studies that looked at narrower slices, such as mitochondrial DNA inherited through the female line.
WSJ: Migrations Spurred Agriculture Spread, Studies Indicate
The genome project, which the government began in 1987, aimed to speed the gene-hunting effort by providing the first full map of all 3 billion base pairs that make up human DNA. (It was not necessary, in this effort, to run through all the pairs on each set of chromosomes, or 6 billion pairs.) And because the base pairs come in only four varieties, they are digital and ideal for computer decoding.
应用推荐