The latest evidence produced by Molina et al. is that rice was domesticated once sometime between 8,200 and 13,500 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China.

Reference: Molina et al. 2011. Molecular evidence for a single evolutionary origin of domesticated rice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA:10.1073/pnas.1104686108.

I wonder if long distance running has the same effects.

The timing of Friedberg’s post is fortuitous for me because I’ve been teaching myself Python recently, and now I’m able to read and understand Friedberg’s entire script without having to refer to a book. The Weasel program would make a nice homework assignment in a programming course.

Yesterday members of the Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT) Consortium published a paper in Nature stating that they have found that human gut biomes fall into three major classes, or enterotypes. These enterotypes are not correlated with the national or even continental origin of the humans studied.

I find these results surprising (not that I know anything about the human microbiome, but the results run counter to my intuition about biology), and I wonder if the classification is an artifact of the analysis. We’ll know soon, since this is a booming area of research powered by high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis.

Excellent summaries of this research can be found on Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog (“Divided by language, united by gut bacteria—people have three common gut types”) and in an article by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times (“Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say”). Carl Zimmer has further comments on his own blog, The Loom (“Blood type, meet bug type: My new story for the New York Times”).

Reference:

Arumugam, Raes, et al. 2011. Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09944.

A quick summary of the results:

• Eight hours of sleep each night for two weeks: No cognitive impairment.
• Six hours of sleep each night for two weeks: Cognitive impairment equal to 24 hours without sleep, which is equivalent mentally to being legally drunk.
• Seven hours of sleep each night: Some cognitive impairment that does not get worse after three days.
• Sleep-deprived subjects underestimate their impairment.

Get more sleep.

I learned about the workshop from Jan Aerts’s blog, Saaien Tist. Dr. Aerts provides a good summary of the workshop in his post, where he mentions that the videos from the workshop will soon appear. Unfortunately, this year’s videos haven’t appeared yet, although 26 videos from the 2010 workshop are available. This is a wonderful resource, and I need to find the time to watch these.

Dr. Aerts mentioned in his post that Tamara Munzner has already posted her slides from her keynote talk on her own website. Dr. Munzner has a well-organized web page with links to slides and other materials from her presentations going back to 1995. I spent some time last night viewing her slides from VizBi 2011, and even without the speaking notes, they were easy to understand. If you’re interested in this topic, then I highly recommend viewing them.

The clash of two titans – physics and chemistry – are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible … at least with current technologies.

The problem is that carrying along everything that is required to support human life in space—water, air, food, fuel—makes long-distance space travel by humans impractical if not impossible. Space is bigger than people realize, and things are just too far away for humans to get there.

As oil reserves dwindle, countries are turning to using crops as a source of biofuel, and this is causing an increase of food prices for a variety of reasons.

It can be tricky predicting how new demand from the biofuel sector will affect the supply and price of food. Sometimes, as with corn or cassava, direct competition between purchasers drives up the prices of biofuel ingredients. In other instances, shortages and price inflation occur because farmers who formerly grew crops like vegetables for consumption plant different crops that can be used for fuel.

The danger is that price increases in basic foodstuffs may lead to increased hunger, even famine, for the poor, who can’t afford to buy enough food to survive.

As a biologist, I found Gruber’s post confusing, because I immediately thought of two Tree of Life web sites, neither of which just went live. One is the Tree of Life Web Project, and the other is Jonathan A. Eisen’s blog, The Tree of Life. Clearly, my brain is elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, Escherichia coli is at the top of the list. Bacillus thuringiensis, the bacterial species that provides the genes that are the focus of the research group I’m in, is 28th on the list.

Thanks to Mike the Mad Biologist at ScienceBlogs for alerting me to this post.

Virginia Hughes, who contributes to the excellent The Last Word on Nothing blog, wrote yesterday about her coffee problem and provided some scientific background.

We metabolize caffeine thanks to a liver enzyme called cytochrome P450 1A2. The enzyme is produced by a gene dubbed CYP1A2.

23andMe found that I carry an ‘C’ variant in CYP1A2 that makes it difficult for the enzyme to do its job. We C people therefore metabolize caffeine more slowly than do people who carry an ‘A’ variant in the same spot.

I guess this means it’s time to get myself genotyped to see what combination of CYP1A2 variants I carry.

Today, a press release and a paper by a joint group of scientists at Franklin National Lab and NASA reveals a new RNA-Protein complex that can read short protein sequences and reverse-translate them back to RNA.  The reverse-translation complex, which they call the  emosobir  (that’s “ribosome” in reverse) is larger even than the ribosome.

I especially like the droll poke at NASA, which has been the source of two highly publicized but scientifically unlikely papers, one about the substitution of arsenate for phosphate in DNA and the other about evidence of bacterial cells in a meteorite. Both of those papers should have been published on April 1 of this year.

The first entry in a week-long series of posts: “When the Going Gets Hot, the Phage Get Going”

Tuesday’s entry: “Mycobacteriophages: More Diverse Than Expected”

Wednesday’s post: “Plastic Phages – Evolution of Mosaically Related Tailed Bacteriophage Genomes”

Thursday’s entry: “Bacteriophage Assembly”

Friday’s post: “Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Bacteriophage DNA”

In this paper, the authors explore some fairly old metagenomic data collected by the famous Global Ocean Sampling project. The authors created phylogenetic trees using the small subunit ribosomal RNA, recA, and rpoB genes, these being highly conserved genes that appear in nearly all organisms. Their goal was to identify deep branches in the phylogenetic trees that might indicate a fourth domain of life in addition to the Bacteria, Archea, and Eukaryota.

And indeed they found some deep branches in the recA and rpoB phylogenetic trees, but they found the results difficult to interpret. (It is a relief to read a paper in which the researchers do not overinterpret their data, unlike certain researchers associated with NASA.) One hypothesis put forward by the authors is that the deep branches of the phylogenetic tree represent viral genes. But the authors pose their alternative hypothesis:

It has not escaped our notice that the characteristics of these novel sequences are consistent with the possibility that they come from a new (i.e., fourth) major branch of cellular organisms on the tree of life. That is, their phylogenetic novelty could indicate phylogenetic novelty of the organisms from which they come. Clearly, confirmation or refutation of this possibility requires follow-up studies such as determining what is the source of these novel, deeply branching sequences (e.g., cellular organisms or viruses). Then, depending on the answers obtained, more targeted metagenomics or single-cell studies may help determine whether the novelty extends to all genes in the genome or is just seen for a few gene families.

It has not escaped my notice that the first sentence above deliberately echoes Watson and Crick’s famous sentence in their 1953 paper describing the structure of DNA.

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

I don’t know who was responsible for this deliberate echo, but it suggests that at least some of the authors believe they have found evidence for a fourth domain of life. Eisen, in the absence of additional data, favors the idea that these are viral genes.

I eagerly wait for additional data that can resolve these questions.

Reference

Wu D, Wu M, Halpern A, Rusch DB, Yooseph S, et al. (2011) Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees. PLoS ONE 6(3): e18011. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018011

Check out these radiation charts, which attempt to put things into perspective.

• A Layman’s Intro to Radiation
• xkcd’s Radiation Chart

[Updated 27-Apr-2011]

Randall Munroe has updated his radiation dose chart on xkcd.com.

Phil Plait, an astronomer who blogs at Bad Astronomy, has commented and stated that he doesn’t know if this claim is true or not. But Plait is rightfully doubtful:

I’ll be honest: my own reaction is one of extreme skepticism. As it should be! All things being equal, I would take news like this with a very large grain of salt, and want a whole lot of outside expert analysis; I’d like to see other biologists examining the original meteorite, too.

Rosie Redfield, a biologist who blogs at RRResearch, concurs:

Executive Summary: Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.

Both of these detailed reviews are well worth reading.

My take, after glancing at the research paper, is that I’m not convinced. I don’t see any real evidence for fossil bacteria.

A related response, where a full meal can cause uncontrolled sneezing, is called snatiation. According to Wikipedia, snatiation is a portmanteau of sneeze and satiation and is an acronym that stands for Sneezing Non-controllably At a Time of Indulgence of the Appetite—a Trait Inherited and Ordained to be Named.

Wikipedia also helpfully explains that ACHOO and snatiation are backronyms, where a backronym is an acronym that has been deliberately created to form a word.

I learned the word hypercapnia from a long and fascinating post, “Human (amphibious model): living in and on the water,” by Greg Downey on the PLoS Blog Network website. There is so much information packed into Downey’s post (which he states in a comment is the draft of a chapter for a book he is writing) that I recommend you read the post in its entirety.

When you hold your breath too long, your body forces you to breathe. I’ve always wondered if this reflex is triggered by a lack of oxygen. Scientists have learned instead that the breathing reflex is triggered by hypercapnia, and the reflex occurs long before there is real danger of hypoxia. That is, it is impossible for most ordinary persons to hold their breath until passing out from lack of oxygen.

Fungi and plants enter a symbiotic relationship in which the microrrhizae of fungi join with the roots of plants, allowing an exchange of nutrients between the organisms. Plants transfer simple carbohydrates, the products of photosynthesis, to the fungi, and they receive in return water and minerals, including ammonia and phosphate ions.

The researchers identified approximately 21,000 genes in the 65 million base pair genome; about 70% of the predicted genes have significant similarity to genes in the sequence databases. As might be expected, the number of predicted membrane-bound transporter proteins is large.

The authors of the paper and Dr. Cullen in his commentary noted that it was expected that the L. bicolor genome would contain genes encoding enzymes for breaking down cellulose and lignin. It was surprising, therefore, that only one gene encoding an endoglucanase with a cellulose-binding domain was identified, and no genes encoding enzymes for breaking down cellulose were found. In contrast, a large number of genes predicted to encode lipases and proteinases were identified, suggesting that L. bicolor derives nutrients from the degradation of bacteria and invertebrates. Martin et al. write:

These observations suggest that the inventory of L. bicolor plant cell wall-degrading enzymes underwent massive gene loss as a result of its adaptation to a symbiotic lifestyle, and that this species is now unable to use many plant cell wall polysaccharides as a carbon source, including those found in soil and leaf litter.

Having now in hand this fungal genome and the genome of the black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa, which enters into ectomycorrhizal symbiosis, the authors predict it will be much easier to identify the genes that mediate the symbiotic relationship.

The first is Gene Sherpas, a blog by Steve Murphy, M.D., about “personalized medicine and you.”

To usher in the new paradigm of personalized medicine we will need to travel a perilous path. Much like the route through the Himalayas it has punished the naive and self-reliant. That is why I have dedicated my life to being a Gene Sherpa. What is a gene sherpa? The Sherpa speaks the language of the trail, he/she knows short cuts and dangerous paths to avoid. This blog is for those wishing to take the journey and those wishing to become Gene Sherpas. Interested? Email me…

Dr. Murphy also writes:

I am the founder of a Personalized Medicine practice (likely the first private practice of its kind). In addition I am the Clinical Genetics Fellow at Yale University until 2010. Now not under contract and that’s why I am posting and running my practice. I also am developing a modern medical genetics curriculum for residents and other physicians. On this blog I am educating the public and hopefully some physicians about the field of genetics and personalized medicine.

The Gene Sherpas blog contains many informative and provocative posts, including a recent post about twin studies and how identical twins aren’t actually so identical when DNA methylation and copy number variation are taken into account.

From Gene Sherpas, I learned about Misha Angrist’s GenomeBoy blog. Dr. Angrist earned a Ph.D. in Genetics at Case Western Reserve University, and he now writes about personal genomics. Dr. Angrist writes:

I work as the Science Editor for the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own). In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.

Dr. Angrist posts frequently about his participation in the Personal Genome Project and about the rapid technological advances that will make personal genomes easy to obtain in the near future.

Nimravid posted a summary, which was graciously acknowledged today by Dr. Gregory, and that was how I learned about the paper. Nimravid’s summary is good (as are all of Nimravid’s posts), but I recommend reading the entire paper, which is very readable and well-presented. I found that I have a pretty clear idea of how to interpret evolutionary trees, but I learned the differences in the terms dendrogram, cladogram, and phylogram.

Dr. Gregory makes an important point in his paper:

[I]t is impossible to know with certainty that any given phylogeny is historically accurate. As a result, any reconstructed phylogenetic tree is a hypothesis about relationships and patterns of branching and thus is subject to further testing and revision with the analysis of additional data.

In my mind, this is why evolution is a science. An evolutionary tree is a model of the evolutionary relationships among organisms. A good model is consistent with existing observations, and it provides a hypothesis than can be tested as additional data are gathered. If the model is inconsistent with the new data, the model is revised and subjected to testing with even more data.

The premise is simple. The site presents a word and four possible meanings, and you click on the meaning you think is correct. With each correct guess, you earn 20 grains of rice that the site owner donates to the United Nations World Food Program. Advertisers pay to display ads on the site, so they are the ones who ultimately pay for the donated rice. The game is fun and addictive, and it has the benefit that you can learn some new words.

As a scientist, I have a pretty large vocabulary, so I can reach a vocabulary score of 48. My wife, who edits medical textbooks and consequently has an enormous vocabulary, routinely reaches 53. A score of 55 is the highest possible.

I have learned some new words, some useful and some not. When someone mentions they wore a rebato trimmed with vair, now I know what they’re talking about.

But one of the words hit my hot button. The word was nostoc, and the required answer was blue-green alga. This annoys me because it is like calling a dolphin a fish, a mushroom a plant, or water an element. The answer is incorrect.

What were once called blue-green algae are properly called cyanobacteria. The distinction is important, because cyanobacteria are prokaryotic organisms and algae are eukaryotic organisms.

While I’m ranting: It’s one alga, many algae; one bacterium, many bacteria.

The paper was originally published online on 24 January 2008, at which time there was a lot of coverage in the press and in blogs. For example, see “Synthetic Genome: Signed, Sealed, Decoded”, by Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, and a roundup of coverage of the announcement at blog.bioethics.net. This paper was also the topic of Science Friday on 25 January 2008.

While the assembly of this synthetic genome is without a doubt a significant technical achievement, the paper does not reveal whether the genome can be transplanted into a bacterial cell. This makes the result anticlimactic; it was like reading about the building of a new airplane, with lots of description about the design of the wings and how the rivets had to be placed just so, but without a demonstration that the airplane could actually fly. I suspect strongly that the transplantation was attempted (several times) without success.

The same group has shown that it is indeed possible to transplant a genome from one bacterial species to another, as described in a paper in Science by Lartigue et al. We must now wait for the JCVI to get their airplane off the ground.

University of California—Davis Professor Jonathan A. Eisen, on his The Tree of Life blog, jokingly complained that Ms. Harmon had interviewed him but had discarded his quotes. Ms. Harmon, good sport that she is, responded in the comments by contributing outtakes of the article that included discarded quotes from Dr. Eisen and from J. Craig Venter.

Dr. Venter, of course, has already had his genome sequenced and analyzed by his institute, the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. The paper describing Dr. Venter’s genome was published in PLoS Biology. Dr. Venter has written a book, A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, and a good review is available on Dr. Jonathan Badger’s T. taxus blog.

Dr. James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, has had his genome sequenced; the data are available at the James Watson’s Personal Genome Sequence Browser web site at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Dr. Church has also organized the Personal Genome Project. This project will sequence and analyze the genomes of volunteers, who will share their medical records, making the data much more useful. I wrote eight days ago about the 1000 Genomes Project, for which medical records will not be available. A blog about the Personal Genome Project, named The Personal Genome, is written by Jason Bobe.

Another company that is providing personal genome data is 23andMe, which provides a blog named The Spittoon. For about $1000, 23andMe obtains data on nearly 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and provides a genetic analysis of the data. Andrew Scheidecker had his genome analyzed by 23andMe in December, 2007, and wrote software called Personal Genome Explorer that made his data available to everyone.

The goal of inexpensively obtaining a genome analysis was deemed important enough for the Archon X Prize for Genomics to promise an award of $10 million for the successful sequencing of 100 genomes in 10 days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. See “$10 Million Prize Set Up for Speedy DNA Decoding”, by Nicholas Wade of The New York Times.

Other companies that have developed high-throughput sequencing technologies that might make the relatively inexpensive genome within reach are 454 Life Sciences, Helicos BioSciences, and Pacific Biosciences. Dr. Eisen saw a talk about the Pacific Biosciences technology and came away enthusiastic, writing in his blog:

But it was the last talk of the whole meeting that really did blow my mind. It was from Steve Turner from Pacific Biosciences. He presented an overview of their sequencing technology as well as a tiny bit of data. Now, normally I am uninterested in marketing talks where little data is presented. But this talk was different. First, their technology clearly has enormous potential for revolutionizing the sequencing field. Basically, what they are doing is reading the activity of a DNA polymerase as it replicates a single DNA molecule and they do it in real time. He referred to this as using the DNA polymerase as a sequencing engine and then he took the crowd through the details of the technology and some of the modifications they have made to make it work better.

Ms. Harmon’s article is one of a series in the New York Times named The DNA Age; another good article written by Ms. Harmon is My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA. Other good articles at the New York Times on personal genomes and high throughput sequence are “The Race to Read Genomes on a Shoestring, Relatively Speaking” and “Working by Eavesdropping on DNA Doing Its Work”, both by Andrew Pollack.

In a few years, it will be routine for everyone to have their genome sequenced and analyzed. It will take a long time to get the quality of the predictions up to a useful level, however. How much of the genome needs to be sequenced to obtain an accurate analysis, 600,000 SNPs (23andMe) or the full genome (Knome, Personal Genome Project)? I personally am interested in having my genome analyzed because, as a scientist, I am always interested in data. However, I would consider the genetic analysis to be speculative until many more genomes have been analyzed.

Notes added on 6 March 2008:

The Genetic Future blog has a post from 22 January 2008 about negative reaction to 23andMe.

I learned from GenomeWeb today that on 8 February 2008, Helicos BioSciences announced that it had sold its first sequencer. Yesterday, Expression Analysis confirmed that they were the purchaser. Expression Analysis said they will use the sequencer for “de novo sequencing, candidate gene sequencing, and digital gene expression.”

In May, 2007, Jonathan provoked a long and fascinating discussion of a paper by Liu and Ochman on the formation of the flagellar system. The consensus was that the paper was irretrievably flawed because of the incorrect use of and incorrect interpretation of BLAST results.

However, Jonathan made a surprising point that many disagreed with.

Personally, I’ve never been convinced that protein structure is of much use in inferring homology or the lack of it; systematists have been burned so many times by incorrectly assumed (non)homology of gross morphological traits in light of convergent and divergent evolution; why should morphology at the protein level be any different? The beauty of molecular systematics is that it’s freed us from having to deal with morphology at all.

Others in the discussion argued forcefully and convincingly that folds are more highly conserved than sequence, and that similar folds provide strong evidence for homology (descent from a common ancestor). I learned a lot from this discussion that will be useful to me.

As I continued my reading, I discovered from Jonathan’s publications page that Jonathan was a coauther on the paper describing the genome sequence of Synechococcus CC9311. The first author was Brian Palenik, a friend of mine who was doing his postdoc in Bob Haselkorn’s lab at the same time I was doing mine. Brian is a much better scientist than I am and deserves his success.

Jonathan’s review of J. Craig Venter’s book, A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, piqued my interest, so now I will have to track down a copy.

This was time well spent for me, and I derived great enjoyment in reading Jonathan’s blog. Jonathan hasn’t posted since December, 2007; I am looking forward to new contributions.

The idea is that plant viruses are poorly understood but play important roles in nature. In the 26 January 2007 issue of Science, Dr. Roossinck and colleagues published a paper in which they described a virus that conferred the ability of a fungus and a tropical grass, in a three-way mutualistic association, to grow at high soil temperatures. When the fungus was cured of the virus, it could no longer confer heat tolerance to the grass.

The viruses that are the most well-characterized are those that cause disease in humans or plants, but Dr. Roossinck estimates that only 1% of all viruses cause disease. In previous surveys of viral genomes, most of the genes identified were completely novel, with no hits in GenBank. Hence, Dr. Roossinck believes that viral genome sequences will provide a rich source of new proteins with unknown functions.

The project is focusing initially on plants that are related to major crop species. The researchers take plant samples back to lab, isolate total nucleic acid, treat with DNase, and look for double-stranded RNA, the hallmark of 80% of plant viruses. This approach is taken because double-stranded RNA in plants is rare except for that produced by viruses. On average, about 60% of the samples yield viral dsRNA. The dsRNA is amplified to DNA by PCR using random hexamer primers and reverse transcriptase. The resulting samples are contaminated with ribosomal genes and other plant genes, but the group has succeeded in obtaining a lot of viral sequences. The group is currently working on obtaining sequence and analyzing the data.

Dr. Roossinck spoke about this project in 2007 at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s Twelfth Annual Symposium at the American Museum of Natural History. The topic of the symposium was Small Matters: Microbes and their Role in Conservation.

Microbe World Radio is sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology, of which I am a member. The shows are produced by Finger Lake Productions. Daily podcasts are available through iTunes and other podcast providers. Archives of Microbe World Radio shows can be found here and here.

Video and audio presentations from the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s Twelfth Annual Symposium are available here.

Li et al. examined 642,690 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the autosomes of 938 individuals representing 51 populations from all over the world. Their analysis was based on the proposition that each person’s genome originated from K different ancestral populations. They performed the analysis with K = 2 through K = 7. With K = 7, they found that the seven components corresponded to populations from Africa, Middle East, Europe, Central/South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Individuals from the Middle East displayed the most mixed ancestry; Palestinians, for example, displayed ancestry from South/Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

The researchers created a maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree from the 51 populations. The sub-Saharan African populations appeared nearest the root of the tree, which was established by the chimpanzee branch, consistent with the hypothesis that humans first appeared in Africa and then migrated to the other continents. The two most distant branches of the tree represented the populations from Oceania and from the Americas.

The large number of markers allowed the group to distinguish finer differences among the populations. For example, the eight European populations sampled in the study — Adygei (an ethnic group from the Russian Caucasus), Basque, French, Italian, Orcadian, Russian, Sardinian, and Tuscan — were well separated in a principal component plot.

There is evidence that RNA polymerase II replicates hepatitis delta virus, which has an RNA genome, but this replication is slow in vitro. The authors speculate that unidentified factors present in the cell increase the processivity of RNA polymerase II when it uses an RNA template.

The press release details the goals of the project, which are to:

• develop a new, highly detailed map of variation in the human genome, a resource that should enable the association of variation of single nucleotide polymorphisms with diseases
• use new DNA sequencing technologies to reduce the cost of the sequencing effort to only $30-50 million

However, no medical information will be available for the persons whose genomes will be sequenced. This seems to negate the value of a lot of the data, since there will be no way to identify associations of SNPs with specific genetic disorders.

The first phase of the project will involve three pilot studies. In the first pilot study, the project will obtain the sequences of six genomes at 20x coverage from two families using new sequencing technologies. This will provide working experience with the new technologies and will enable the project to choose which sequencing method to move forward with.

In the second pilot study, the project will obtain 2x coverage of 180 genomes to provide experience with data management and interpretation.

The third pilot study will focus on obtaining the sequences of the exons of approximately 1000 genes from 1000 people. This study will provide additional experience in data management and interpretation.

The project will then move on to the production phase, which will take two years. The project leaders anticipate a sequencing throughput of more than 8 billion bases per day. It will be extremely challenging to capture and analyze so much data.