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Pocket-sized scanner helps fill gaps in the human genome

By Michael Le Page

29 January 2018

Technician injects fluid into MinION DNA sequencer

Portable and getting better fast

Patrice Latron/EURELIOS/Look At Sciences/SPL

We’ve yet to finish sequencing the entire human genome – but we have just filled in a few of the remaining gaps thanks to a tiny, cheap DNA sequencer.

Some parts of the human genome consist of short sequences repeated over and over again. Conventional DNA sequencing methods can only read a few hundred DNA letters at a time, so it has not been possible to fully sequence the most repetitive stretches of DNA – little pieces can be sequenced but there is no way to join these pieces up…

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