Figure 1.
Credit: NASA/WTSI
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute announced recently that it has now sequenced two billion “letters” (base pairs) of DNA from different organisms. The institute estimated that if this quantity of DNA were scaled up so that its width was the same as that of a spiral staircase it would reach to the moon. The two million base pairs sequenced include more than 900 million from human DNA, 600 million from mouse DNA, and more than 25 genomes of pathogens, including malaria and whooping cough.
Dr Jane Rogers, head of sequencing at the institute, said: “The work carried out here has forever changed the way science works. Our understanding of organisms has been pushed forward light years.”