Research News
Grants for Nanoscale Science & Engineering Bolster Efforts to Generate Faster, Cheaper DNA Sequencing Tools
Looking ahead to a future in which each person's genome can be sequenced as a routine part of medical research and health care, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded new grants to support development of innovative technologies with the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of DNA sequencing. These awards are part of an ambitious program to develop technologies to reduce the cost of sequencing full mammalian genomes to about $100,000 by 2009 and to about $1000 by 2014. Some of the grantees are looking to nanoscale science and engineering to make their contributions toward this goal.
More about NHGRI's sequencing technology development grants.
Grants that seek to apply nanoscale science and engineering include:
Sequencing by Recognition
- Stuart Lindsay, Ph.D., Arizona State University, Tempe
- $877,000 (3 years)
- A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, much too small to be seen with a conventional lab microscope. Several groups are developing nanopores (holes about two nanometers in diameter) that may be able to recognize individual DNA bases by their electrical or ionic signals to achieve high-accuracy sequencing of individual DNA molecules. This research team seeks to develop molecular wires that are sufficiently flexible and sensitive to enable this type of sequencing.
Hybridization-Assisted Nanopore DNA Sequencing
- Xinsheng Sean Ling, Ph.D., Brown University, Providence, R.I.
- $820,000 (3 years)
- Investigating further the potential of nanopore technology, these researchers intend to use solid-state nanopores to detect the location, along a DNA strand, where another short, known DNA sequence attaches by hybridization (base-pairing). By doing this experiment many times with many different short, known sequences, the sequence of long DNA strands would be determined.
Nanopore Array Force Spectroscopy Chip for Rapid Clinical Genotyping
- Andre Marziali, Ph.D., University of British Columbia, Vancouver
- $746,000 (3 years)
- These investigators will develop solid-state, nanopore-based force spectroscopy for rapid electronic detection of sequence variation. The project builds on the team's previous demonstration of the ability to detect sequences at single base resolution using organic nanopore force spectroscopy.
Hybridization-Assisted Nanopore Sequencing
- John S. Oliver, Ph.D., NABsys, Inc., Providence, R.I.
- $498,000 (2 years)
- This team will work with collaborators at Brown University to develop the biochemical and algorithmic components of a method for sequencing by hybridization. By designing tagged probes and novel reconstruction algorithms, the team expects to get around the resolution limits that have prevented nanopores from being used for sequencing.
Sequencing DNA by Transverse Electrical Measurements in Nanochannels
- Robert Riehn, Ph.D., North Carolina State University, Raleigh
- $439,000 (2 years)
- This group proposes to stretch long DNA molecules by passing them through nanofluidic channels. Nanoelectrodes will be built into those channels to detect each DNA base's specific electrical signal.
High-Throughput, Low-Cost DNA Sequencing Using Probe Tip Arrays
- H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
- $2,184,000 (3 years)
- This group has proven the feasibility of accelerating and miniaturizing the conventional Sanger method of DNA sequencing by relying on nano-scale electrophoretic separation of DNA fragments along the surface of an Atomic Force Microscope probe tip. This method reduces volume of materials, potentially accelerating and reducing the cost of sequencing. Researchers plan to demonstrate these very challenging separations and to implement them on a massively parallel sequencing platform containing hundreds of probe tips.