Dr. James Lupski (photo) of the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) came to the end of a long personal quest earlier this year when the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center (BHGSC) sequenced his complete genome and identified the gene and mutations involved in his own form of Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, which affects the function of nerves in the body's limbs, hands, and feet. The results were published in the March 11, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a journal chosen, in part, because the authors believe this type of information will be crucial to physicians; as well as to the research community. The authors hope that their results will help begin a new era of clinical sequencing. The sequencing was carried out using next-generation sequencing technology, which has dramatically increased throughput and reduced costs. "This is the first time we have tried to identify a disease gene this way," said Dr. Lupski, Vice Chair of Molecular and Human Genetics at BCM. "It demonstrates that the technology is robust enough that we can find disease genes by determining the whole genome sequence. We can start to use this technology to interpret the clinical information in the context of the sequence--of the hand of cards you have been dealt. Isn't that the goal or dream of personalized genomic medicine?" According to a summary in Science Now, the BHGSC sequencing effort cost $50,000. As it turns out, the same mutations could have been found by sequencing only the protein-coding regions of the genome—a process called “exome” sequencing—for about $4,000. But full sequencing will soon be just as cheap as exome sequencing and will catch disease mutations in noncoding regions as well, said Dr. Richard Gibbs, Director of the BHGSC.
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