Scientists at the University of Nottingham have made a major breakthrough in genome sequencing, which will enable them to search for the underlying causes of diseases in human DNA quicker than ever before.
Scientists at the University of Nottingham have made a major breakthrough in genome sequencing, which will enable them to search for the underlying causes of diseases in human DNA quicker than ever before.
Understanding the sequence of human DNA gives scientists information about diseases, including potentially how to diagnose or treat them. In a new paper published in Nature Biotechnology, scientists from the School of Life Sciences at the University have shown that it is now possible to selectively sequence fragments of DNA more quickly and cost effectively than previously, without searching through DNA strands that are not relevant to the biological question, reaching that answer quicker than before.
This could have major implications in how genetic diseases are understood and diagnosed.
Professor Matt Loose, of the DeepSeq Sequencing Facility in the School of Life Sciences at the University led this project. He said: “In simple terms, we can now sequence the bits of DNA that we want to and ignore bits we don’t. The advances we present here mean we can search through and sequence regions from genomes even as large as the human genome.”
Read more at: University of Nottingham
