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This slide has 1.6 million separate oligo wells. And this 454 DNA sequencer can replace 50 of the prior generation machines, and rooms full of equipment for E.Coli amplification (cloning and robotic colony picking).
9 responses to “another 50x”
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Tell more Oh Science Guru the great Jurve…please – it sounds interesting but what’s being measured and counted etc …Is is the rate of colony growth of bacterial organisms on various mediums ?
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Oh, I’m just a kid marveling at how much I still have to learn.
These are high throughput DNA sequencing machines. So the end product is the ATGC sequence for a given genome. The earlier approaches with terminating bases and gel electrophoresis required replication of the DNA under test using E.Coli bacteria as the reproducing vehicle. With hundreds of separate E.Coli colonies on a plate, one of the laborious steps (now automated with vision systems and robotics) was to identify the unique colonies and make sure they had not bumped into a neighbor.
I talk about the context of this research here (the goal is synthetic genomics – engineering new forms of life to do interesting things)
The 454 uses a new technique with an optical readout.
Looking forward, there are some really fast approaches in development (comment here) that could offer several orders of magnitude improvement.
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dude your way to put togehter for a mad scientist. You need the floppy hair, the geek glasses and the thin mustache, and a better screen saver.
But really that is cool stuff. The robotic vision is a huge step to making these things come out of the lab.
i wonder how long it will be before EColiRUS is a website.
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That hairdo is nothing. You should see my adivisor’s on a sunday morning in the lab.
All hairtalk aside, that just looks awesome. Us ‘mortal microbial ecologists’ (as in ‘within a budget’) usually end up picking each and every one of the colonies by hand, and sending 96-well plates out to sequence at at time, at what we believe are friendlier prices than they’ve ever been. Then we sit. And we wait.
This beautious machine is the giant leap forward to start getting massive information, even full genomes and metagenomes sequenced in a day.
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