Affordable DNA Sequencing And Computational Power
Nutritional genomics is a science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health. It can be divided into two disciplines:
* Nutrigenomics: studies the effect of nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in physiology.
Turkey's government is about to pass legislation that could cripple the country's biological research.
Nature 463, 1000 (25 February 2010) | doi:10.1038/4631000a; Published online 24 February 2010
An absurd law
When politicians respond to popular distrust of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they sometimes fail to grasp how intricately molecular technologies infiltrate different areas of science. A case in point is now playing out in Turkey, where an attempt to regulate GMOs in agriculture has morphed into a draft law that could wipe out the country's biomedical research.
It took Christopher Columbus almost 5 weeks to reach the continent America. Today, you fly to New York in about 8 hours. The first commercial computer was about $1,550,000 and weighed somewhere around 13 tons.
How much did you spend for your cellphone, for your labtop ?
In 1918, only 1 in 13 US families owned a car. By 1929, 4 out of 5 families had one. In the same time period, the number of cars on the road increased from 8 million to 23 million.
Genome Sequencing is a collaborative work. Not only bio-tech companies but also companies with IT structure are working towards the same goal. Whole genome sequencing under $1000. Even Amazon.com is on the track.
* Agilent Technologies Inc, a leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis, offers the SureSelect Target Enrichment System, which helps geneticists analyze larger numbers of samples.
* Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services offers data storage products through so-called cloud computing, in which data is stored remotely on servers in data centers.
Functional SNP assessment.
Although the relationship between risk allele and causation is still in its infancy23, some phenotypic traits can possibly be inferred from the genome data (all functional SNPs discussed below are listed in Supplementary Table 14). We only included genotypes with a posterior probability above 99%.
Pharma, biotech and agriculture markets as well as academic institutions are craving for DNA sequence information as their future is depending on genome data in silico. Scientists understand the business side of the sector, and realize that outsourcing can be a pretty cost efficient way to get the data they need, rather than investing in the resources to perform the sequencing in their labs. In addition, outsourcing gives these institutions the ability to focus their efforts on their core competencies, usually drug discovery and development, instead of acquiring the tools for sequencing.
Is there something like American Genes, a group of genes that is unique to USA ?
The following NY-times article is the answer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02...
Relevant:
http://www.theroot.com/
http://www.cyberpursuits.com/g...
http://AfricanDNA.com
It is not as complicated as you think as long as you stick on the recipe.
1. Apply POI (Perturbation Of Interest) to your cells.
This could be a drug treatment, hyper- or hypo- oxia treatment or simply disease cells.
2. Get your normal control, untreated cells ready.
Now we are going to take molecular genetics pictures of your cells.
3. Spin down your cells.
4. Isolate RNA.
5. Get the cDNA copy of the RNA.
The cDNA copy of your cells represents the most recent status of cells of interest. Ready to take the picture.
Prostate cancer is the most common cause of death from cancer in men over 75 years old. It is the third most common cause of death from cancer in men of all ages. Men at higher risk include African-America men older than 60, farmers, tire plant workers, painters, and especially men exposed to cadmium. The lower risk group include Japanese men and vegetarians.
Super Computer
Roadrunner is a fast computer. To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day. The investment into roadrunner is nothing compared to its abilities. Only, $100 million.
