Illumina machines can be tweaked to give data quickly, says Chad Nusbaum, the co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass.
Future research will look at how the microbiome is "established in infants and maintained throughout life, " said Bruce Birren, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute, says that he thinks of the technology as being akin to digital photography: it was adopted because it was small and fast, but there was always the potential that it would replace film.