NIH Commits $6.7 M to Advance DNA, RNA Sequencing Technology

“Can you believe they make DNA sequencers the size of staplers?” asked Meni Wanunu, Ph.D. “Ideas that were crazy twenty years ago are now happening!”

Dr. Wanunu, assistant professor in the physics department at Northeastern University, is surely not alone in his astonishment. The field of DNA sequencing is full of ideas that are just crazy enough to work. We now have technology that uses light emitted from glowing molecules to figure out the correct order of a DNA sequence, and a cell phone-size device that harnesses electric current to decipher the genome.

“Parts of the genome remain hidden, or are extremely hard to analyze with current methods,” said Jeffery Schloss, Ph.D., director of the Division of Genome Sciences at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). “If we can’t see what’s there then we can’t learn how it works. New technologies are still needed.”

To that end, NHGRI is awarding $6.7 million in new research grants to develop DNA sequencing technologies that are more sensitive, faster, cheaper and more accurate than those we already have. These new awards are a re-up in an investment that began in 2004 through the Genome Technology Program.

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Physics