3 ms·

How fast can we sequence now? What are the error rates?

• new299 11y ago
  About 6 Gigabases per hour, somewhere in that ballpark. Probably something like the equivalent of the human genome project (which took >10 years and 3 billion USD in the 90s) every few days. Error rates are in the region of 1 to 0.1% generally. I've never really worked directly with capillary data but understand it's error rate in early bases is limited by the amplification step. Which would be ~0.0001% (1 in 10000). That said there might be a coarse filter (based on signal intensity etc) that would identify a subpopulation of high-throughput reads which have a <0.1% error rate. But I don't believe I've seen that reported. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has thoughts on that though.
  • i000 11y ago
    The absolute error-rate is not really a problem if the errors are random and you have the budget to sequence enough independent fragments. Sequencing becomes tricky (both Sanger and next-gen) because of non-random recurrent artifacts associated with the sequencing method or molecular manipulations done to the DNA or RNA.