Sean King

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San Juan, Puerto Rico, United States

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

DNA Technology Posts Dramatic Speed Increases

Wired: A prominent genetics institute recently sequenced its trillionth base pair of DNA, highlighting just how fast genome sequencing technology has improved this century.

Every two minutes, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute sequences as many base pairs as all researchers worldwide did from 1982 to 1987, the first five years of international genome-sequencing efforts.

That speed is thanks to the technology underlying genomics research, which has been improving exponentially every couple of years, similar to the way computer tech improves under Moore's Law.

Amazing. Just...amazing.

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