Question: We're told that genome sequencing takes just days/hours now, yet only a few genomes get published. How come they take so long?

Vicky Forster answered on 29 Dec 2013:

Hello! Good question, Karolina has most of the points covered, but just to add a little which is relevant particularly to the work I do in cancer research. We do sequence large numbers of cancer patient genomes in order to find particular genes which may for example determine how certain patients respond to chemotherapy drugs, or whether patients are likely to survive the disease. This is very useful information and in the future may allow us to tailor treatments specifically to each patient. However, the reality of whole genome sequencing is that it has only just become affordable enough for us to do large numbers of samples to do these studies. Whole genome sequencing costs between £5000-10000 per sample, so as you can probably appreciate, looking at large numbers of cancer patient genomes is incredibly expensive. A few years ago, it was prohibitively so. So, it’s not so much limited now by time, as you state, but by money and funding. Additionally, scientists will also often have to publish their research before they make their genome sequencing data available globally – so in summary, i would expect a lot more of these genomes to be available over the next few years. If you are interested in finding about more, look up the ‘1000 genomes project’.