OBBeC.com

Hinxton, Cambridge, UK (OBBeC) - According to a report from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the institute has sequenced the equivalent of 300 human genomes in just over six months. The Institute has just reached a total of 1,000,000,000,000 letters of genetic code that will be read by researchers worldwide, helping them to understand the role of genes in health and disease.

"I am delighted that our rapid adoption of next-generation sequencing technologies has been so successful in driving forward our biomedical research," says Dr Harold Swerdlow, Head of Sequencing Technology at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "Our internal projects, our work with external collaborators and our participation in major international programmes are all benefiting from our success. "

The Institute has major roles in projects such as The 1000 Genomes Project, The International Cancer Genome Consortium and the second round of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, all of which will depend on DNA sequence to uncover genetics variants that are important for human disease. Next-generation sequencing is also enabling the Institute's own research portfolio.

Raw data is produced by the next-generation sequencing platforms at the Sanger Institute on a massive scale - more than 50 Terabytes of quality-filtered data per week currently. These data are being deposited in both local and international databases.