A vision for ubiquitous sequencing

Abstract

Genomics has recently celebrated reaching the $1000 genome milestone, making affordable DNA sequencing a reality. With this goal successfully completed, the next goal of the sequencing revolution can be sequencing sensors-miniaturized sequencing devices that are manufactured for real-time applications and deployed in large quantities at low costs. The first part of this manuscript envisions applications that will benefit from moving the sequencers to the samples in a range of domains. In the second part, the manuscript outlines the critical barriers that need to be addressed in order to reach the goal of ubiquitous sequencing sensors.

The future of DNA sequencing

“…One commentator even identified the toilet as the ideal place to monitor family health through real-time DNA sequencing 11 .…”

Advancements in Next-Generation Sequencing

“…The long sequence reads of the Pacific Biosciences platform have allowed the analysis of challenging areas of the genome, such as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I region transcripts (19,129) and regions of segmental duplication (52). Studies performed to generate de novo assemblies have also illustrated the impact of the platform and its potential role in developing routine analysis of human genomes driven by de novo assembly rather than comparisons to a reference sequence (18,31).…”

“…Although not all studies examining rare diseases or cohorts of tumors with sequencing technologies will have as compelling an outcome, there is no doubt that sequencing will play an increasing role in research, health care, and industrial experiments and that the number of available applications will continue to grow with the innovation and creativity of the scientific community. Erlich (31) has published an interesting review of sequencing that focuses on the barriers that remain to the ubiquitous use of sequencing sensors, including sequencing at home, in forensics, and in security applications.…”

The role of high performance, grid and cloud computing in high-throughput sequencing

“…Interestingly, we can see that the next wave of sequencing technologies are moving away from high-throughput to small scale real time sequencing. Such devices include Oxford Nanopore's MinION, DNA sequencing sensors to integrate with devices for more bounded tasks such as pathogens surveillance [73].…”