Existing DNA sequencers, he reasoned, used clunky technology akin to computers based on vacuum tubes.
On January 10, Life Technologies and Illumina both announced plans for faster, same-day DNA sequencers.
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Illumina, Applied Biosystems and Helicos Biosciences are among the other players making or developing next-generation gene sequencers.
As a result, large banks of computers sit next to most of the sequencers that Illumina sells.
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Sequencers offer huge advantages over conventional tape recording, starting with undo features no razor blade can approach.
When automated gene sequencers began sifting through thousands of DNA units a day, Incyte switched its focus to genes in 1993.
Another notable loss was Pacific Biosciences, the maker of high-tech DNA sequencers.
Gene sequencers can now read all the code that makes life tick.
If the cost does drop, the market "verges on being insatiable, " says Jay Flatley, chief executive of Illumina, the leading maker of DNA sequencers.
Most existing DNA sequencers (including the 454 machine) do their reading by attaching light-producing molecules to DNA, taking pictures and analyzing the resulting image.
Best of all, sequencers provide nondestructive processing: they don't permanently apply your edits and effects to the audio tracks you've recorded unless that's what you want.
The early DNA sequencers that were used in the Human Genome Project started out at Perkin-Elmer before a restructuring made the technology part of a separate company.
Illumina of San Diego, the leading maker of DNA sequencers, runs a service business that chief executive Jay Flatley has said has been seeing mainly infants and cancer patients.
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Far less lucky was Pacific Biosciences, the maker of DNA sequencers which is ranking on the sad side of this roundup for the second month in a row.
Like all potentially disruptive innovations, gene sequencers could fizzle.
Existing sequencers are like computer mainframes in the 1960s.
Complete Genomics also offers sequencing as a kind of service, and chief executive Clifford Reed told me in an interview that hospitals experimenting with sequencers for diagnosis could certainly use his service.
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Now new entrants, like the Ion Torrent sequencing technology owned by Life Technology and the new types of sequencers being developed by Oxford Nanopore are fomenting more competition and driving costs down even further.
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Rather than compete with makers of big DNA sequencing machines, PerkinElmer is creating a service business that will allow researchers to get human genetic data without owning their own DNA sequencers or high-powered supercomputers.
Roche's 454 Life Sciences unit, the biotech Illumina and Applied BioSystems have all introduced new gene sequencers that are far cheaper and faster than the ones that sequenced Venter's genes, but also less exacting.
Mixing with a long motorised fader and real transport controls is certainly more fun than clicking at an icon with a mouse (or pushing the space bar, which starts and stops most software sequencers).
New, faster genetic sequencers are making this work ever more possible, especially since they don't require DNA to be extracted from cells and then replicated in bacteria, a process that can actually cause valuable data to be lost.
Initially Venter will do the sequencing on existing machines optimized for speed, but he has a bigger goal in mind: to hasten the arrival of a new generation of ultrafast sequencers that can read the genome far faster, at far lower cost.
Working with patient samples collected by the MMRF and using DNA sequencers made by Illumina of San Diego, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard sequenced the genes of 38 myeloma tumors and the DNA of the patients in whom they were growing.
Now, using one of the fastest DNA sequencers on the market, researchers at Penn State, Columbia University, and the United States Department of Agriculture have found that collapsing hives are much more likely to be infected by the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), using a new approach that aims to sequence all the genes in an environment almost as if they were single organisms.
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