“That’s like a hard drive that’s 300-gigabyte,” Bader says, referring to one of the larger machines across the hall. Bader says the device, if it proves itself, could be a boost for the emerging field of individualized medicine, which looks at a patient’s own DNA profiles to determine best treatments. What it can do, however, is accurately read any segment of your genetic material that a physician or researcher may want to examine. “This is a glimpse of the future that we have in our hand.”īader’s team at the U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research has become the first in the world to create a proven software app for the emerging technology.Īppropriately dubbed the MinION, the puny machine hasn’t the brute power of its cross-corridor cousins to sequence the entire three-billion base pairs that make up the human genome. “This is the potential next generation (of sequencer) technology, this thing right here,” says the University of Toronto computational biologist, brandishing a rectangular contraption the size of a Swiss army knife. Sitting on a bench in a sixth-floor University of Toronto lab on College St., a pair of suitcase-sized genomic sequencers flaunt the high-tech gleam and heft befitting their $750,000 price tags.Īcross the hall, Gary Bader holds up a dinky device in the palm of his hand that can also read your DNA.
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