Biotechs use nanotech in pursuit of $100 sequencing bill

The bill on sequencing a genome has fallen from a few billion dollars to about $60,000 in just five years. And with most of the sequencing tech companies racing to be able to do it for $1,000 in a few more years, you'd think the market had a new low price firmly in mind. But you'd have to knock another zero off the new goal to get where Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix expect to go. Researchers at the companies say they can do it all for $100--eventually--by gathering all possible five-letter DNA segments together and then matching them against the target chromosome. By threading each DNA molecule into a nanodevice that forces the DNA to straighten, researchers get a clear look at it.

"Since we can stretch out DNA, we can get a huge amount of information from each piece of DNA we look at," Mike Boyce-Jacino, CEO of BioNanomatrix, tells MIT Technology Review. "The big difference from any other approach is that we are looking at physical location at the same time we are looking at sequence information."

- read the article in MIT Technology Review

ALSO: BioNanomatrix is a fledgling company which only recently garnered $5.1 million in a Series A. Release

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