Company claims to have sequenced man's genome cheaply

A company based in San Diego, California, claims to have sequenced an individual human genome cheaper and faster than ever before.

The company, Illumina, said this week that it had sequenced DNA from the genome of an anonymous African man in “a matter of weeks” for US$100,000. This compares with last year’s announcement that 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut, had sequenced the genome of Nobel prize winner James Watson in two months for under $1 million. In October, Chinese officials also announced they had sequenced an Asian man's genome for about $1 million.

The completion of the human-genome reference sequence, announced in 2001, took more than a decade and cost $3 billion.

But Illumina’s announcement came before any of its supporting data were made available, leaving scientists eager to see more details before commenting on the significance of the effort. Many point out that the company has an interest in selling its Genome Analyzer, one in a crowded field of high-speed sequencing machines.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080208/full/news.2008.563.html