What would you do if you could sequence everything?

Abstract

It could be argued that the greatest transformative aspect of the Human Genome Project has been not the sequencing of the genome itself, but the resultant development of new technologies. A host of new approaches has fundamentally changed the way we approach problems in basic and translational research. Now, a new generation of high-throughput sequencing technologies promises to again transform the scientific enterprise, potentially supplanting array-based technologies and opening up many new possibilities. By allowing DNA/RNA to be assayed more rapidly than previously possible, these next-generation platforms promise a deeper understanding of genome regulation and biology. Significantly enhancing sequencing throughput will allow us to follow the evolution of viral and bacterial resistance in real time, to uncover the huge diversity of novel genes that are currently inaccessible, to understand nucleic acid therapeutics, to better integrate biological information for a complete picture of health and disease at a personalized level and to move to advances that we cannot yet imagine.

Figure 1

The number of publications with keywords for nucleic acid detection and sequencing technologies. PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) was searched in two-year increments for key words and the number of hits plotted over time. For 2007–2008, results from January 1–March 31, 2008 were multiplied by four and added to those for 2007. Key words used were those listed in the legend except for new sequencing technologies (‘next-generation sequencing’ or ‘high-throughput sequencing’), ChIP (‘chromatin immunoprecipitation’ or ‘ChIP-Chip’ or ‘ChIP-PCR’ or ‘ChIP-Seq’), qPCR (TaqMan or qPCR or ‘real-time PCR’) and SNP analysis (SNPs or ‘single-nucleotide polymorphisms’ and not nitroprusside (nitroprusside is excluded because sodium nitroprusside is sometimes abbreviated as ‘SNP’ but is generally unrelated to genetics)).

Figure 2

Relative sample and data throughputs for different nucleic acid detection and sequencing technologies. A rough estimate of the number of samples that can be run on a single instrument in one week with the resultant data points is shown on a logarithmic scale for different technologies. This is intended for comparative scale and is not exact.

Figure 3

What can high-throughput sequencing do for you? The breadth of information that can be generated with high-throughput sequencing and the variety of sample sources is illustrated.