Sanger Institute sequences its trillionth DNA base

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a major genetics research institute set in idyllic countryside a few miles south of Cambridge, UK, has reached a symbolic milestone: the sequencing of over one trillion DNA letters in just six months.

That's the equivalent of almost 350 entire human genomes. At the current rate (which is rapidly increasing) the Sanger is churning out more DNA sequence every two minutes than was generated by the entire research community from 1982-1987. This obscene rate of data generation has been enabled by the development of next-generation DNA sequencing platforms, which can each churn out one human genome equivalent in less than a week.

About a third of the trillion bases was generated for the 1000 Genomes Project, a massive international collaboration that will ultimately sequence the entire genomes of over 1,000 individuals drawn from multiple human populations. I commented last month on the fact that this project has become an important proving ground for the three major next-gen sequencing platforms on the market (454, Solexa and SOLiD), each of which is keen to position itself early as the technology of choice as the era of medical genomics draws ever closer.

From the data posted on the Institute's web site the Sanger actually reached the milestone a few weeks ago - the graph below shows the cumulative amount of purity-filtered (high-quality) sequence data generated since August 2007, with the curve crossing the magic "1000 Gb" mark in early June.



It's worth noting that there are also several other large sequencing facilities around the world (such as the Broad Institute) that are churning out roughly comparable amounts of sequencing data.

The brief window of time in which celebrity genomics was enough to get you into Nature is already closing; it's time for population genomics.

Update: Wired has a concise and timely review of progress in sequencing technology.


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