Mailund on the Internet

When writing grant applications I’ve been saying that we could expect whole genome re-sequencing in association mapping studies to be cost effective within the decade. I’m beginning to think that a decade is rather pessimistic.

The cost of re-sequencing is now down to $100,000.

Sure, that is about a factor of 100 more than just getting the SNPs covering your genome and probably tagging most interesting genetic factors we know about, but I would no longer be surprised if the cost would drop to $1000 for re-sequencing within a year, and $1000 was cheap enough for chip based whole genome association mapping studies, so it will be cheap enough for re-sequencing studies.

You can find more on the dropping cost of re-sequencing on Eye on DNA: Whole Genome Sequencing Costs Continue to Drop.

I’d better get cracking on developing analysis methods that can then actually analyse such data…

CLC Bio has started a new blog on “next generation sequencing” — whatever they mean by that. Check it out here and see the announcement here.

CLC Bio is a bioinformatics company here in Aarhus and I have several old friends working there. The software they develop looks very nice, but I haven’t really used it myself. It doesn’t really match the problems I work with myself. What’s cooler, though, is that they also develop custom hardware for computationally intensive bioinformatics tasks: The Cube and The Cell.

I’m not really sure what’s supposed to go on their new blog, but since I’m a sucker for science blogs I’ll probably subscribe to it for a while and find out.

The regulatory machinery built from small RNA genes is a fairly recent discovery and a very exciting one. There’s a short overview paper about it in Nature:

Molecular biology: The expanding world of small RNAs Nature 451, 414 (2008). doi:10.1038/451414a Helge Großhans & Witold Filipowicz

Kristian Høgsberg called it “blag”. Blog lag. Once in a while, a blog just goes dead for a while. This happened here last week. Sorry about that, folks, I just got busy with other stuff…It will happen again!