Sequence me up!

Yay! Sequencing technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. A company called Complete Genomics has cut it's price of sequencing a human genome from $250,000 to $20,000!!! Their goal? To sequence 10,000 genomes by 2010.

Only days ago Complete Genomics announced that it had raised $45 million from investors excited by the potential of an economic sequencing technology. By radically reducing the cost of sequencing, Complete Genomics expects to cater to a large field of developers looking for genetic clues to treat disease and identify patients most likely to respond to new therapies.

Dude - forget about genetic disease for a moment ... I just want to know if my ratio of G-C to A-T pairs is above 1 ... or let's see how functional my telomerase is. And what I've really been waiting for - see how many times the sequence GATTACA shows up. Where's 20k when I need it?

Seriously though, this is an amazing economic breakthrough - having more human genomes is awesome so that we can really get data on SNPs and do fine-mapping of disease alleles. Now we just need to get all those people who get sequence to sign release forms to do comparative analysis ... making the world a better place one genome at a time.