The Gene Machine and Me

[Alan C. Lawhon]

This article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/dev ... ne-and-me# is fascinating. As you read this article, it's immediately obvious how these machines can be used to sequence large (statistically significant) pools of people with known diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimers. With enough individual sequences, common gene mutations (and groups of common gene mutations relevant to a specific disease) should jump out. This type of statistical sampling may point to genes which have not previously been suspected as a factor linking to a specific disease. If some of these newly identified genes (whether suspected or not) code for a specific protein, we could have a new protein folding project.

With the cost of your own DNA sequence soon to be under a thousand dollars, I suppose we are less than five years away from every newborn infant being sequenced. Goodness, I suppose a lot of expecting "parents-to-be" will want their child sequenced even before they are born. This is really mind boggling ...

NOTE: You may have to scroll down a bit to get to the first paragraph of the article. Long (but fascinating) read.