Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Your genome in minutes

Scientists from Imperial College London are developing technology that could ultimately sequence a person’s genome in mere minutes, at a fraction of the cost of current commercial techniques.

The researchers have patented an early prototype technology that they believe could lead to an ultrafast commercial DNA sequencing tool within ten years. Their work is described in a study published this month in the journal Nano Letters and it is supported by the Wellcome Trust Translational Award and the Corrigan Foundation.

The research suggests that scientists could eventually sequence an entire genome in a single lab procedure, whereas at present it can only be sequenced after being broken into pieces in a highly complex and time-consuming process. Fast and inexpensive genome sequencing could allow ordinary people to unlock the secrets of their own DNA, revealing their personal susceptibility to diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cancer. Medical professionals are already using genome sequencing to understand population-wide health issues and research ways to tailor individualised treatments or preventions.

Dr Joshua Edel, one of the authors on the study from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, said: “Compared with current technology, this device could lead to much cheaper sequencing: just a few dollars, compared with $1m to sequence an entire genome in 2007. We haven’t tried it on a whole genome yet but our initial experiments suggest that you could theoretically do a complete scan of the 3,165 million bases in the human genome within minutes, providing huge benefits for medical tests, or DNA profiles for police and security work. It should be significantly faster and more reliable, and would be easy to scale up to create a device with the capacity to read up to 10 million bases per second, versus the typical 10 bases per second you get with the present day single molecule real-time techniques.”

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The 10 most powerful tweets of 2010

The 10 Most Powerful Tweets of the Year 2010

Top tweets of 2010

Twitter has analyzed the 25 billion tweets sent in 2010 to derive the top 10 twitter trends of 2010, top news, top technology topics, and several other categories of tweets.

Top topics

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

Top news:

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue
6. Chavez Tas Ponchao
7. Wikileaks Cablegate
8. Hurricane Earl
9. Prince Williams Engagement
10. World Aids Day

Top technology tweets:

1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty Black Ops
6. New Twitter
7. HTC
8. RockMelt
9. MacBook Air
10. Google Instant