The U.S. company promised to decipher the human genome five thousand dollars

The U.S. company Complete Genomics announced that it has developed technology of decoding the human genome will reduce the cost of this whole process up to five thousand dollars. It is reported The New York Times.

DNA sequence of the human body is encoded only four letters A, C, G and T. The length of the total, "the words" for 23 pairs of chromosomes is around six billion characters. Decoding the genome of an individual - Clarification of the sequence of letters, which encodes all the genetic information of individuals.

The first decoding the human genome was held in 2001 (in 2003 was received clean version) as part of the international project "Human Genome" (Human Genome Project). The cost of decoding is, by some estimates, three billion dollars. In 2007, decoding the genome pioneering DNA by James Watson cost one million dollars. Currently, the cost of this process is about 100 thousand dollars. More recently, the company manufacturing equipment for laboratories announced that their new laboratory for genome decoding will reduce the cost of up to 10 thousand dollars without taking into account the payment of staff.

Complete Genomics company has no plans to provide services to private individuals. It looked mainly at the orders of laboratories and institutes conducting genetic research.

According to specialists, is an important milestone in the move "a thousand dollars per genome - lowering prices below that milestone could be the start of the mass of genomics. The same views voiced James Watson during his public lectures in Moscow in July 2008.