A glimpse of your genetic future for $1000.

NUCLEOTIDE sequence; NUCLEIC acid analysis; HUMAN gene mapping; HUMAN genome; MYCOPLASMA; DNA

This article focuses on new methods of personal genome sequencing. The first human genome sequence took $800 million and 11 years to complete. The "Sanger" method used to do it has changed little since it was developed in the 1970s by Fred Sanger at the University of Cambridge. Jonathan Rothberg, founder of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut, and his team demonstrated their method by sequencing the 580,000-base genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalum to an accuracy of 99.96 per cent in just four hours. At Harvard University, Gregory Porreca and his colleagues use a similar method, but at every stage four lengths of DNA are added, each nine bases long and with one of the four nucleotides at a known position.