Sequence your Own: Expect to see a machine on the market by early 2007 that will sequence a whole genome in three days at a cost of $5,000.

You may be thinking about switching to an LCD or plasma TV or PC monitor. Hospitals spend substantial sums on monitors for high-definition imaging, and the demand for more and better models will increase as the use of imaging continues to grow. (Indeed, it is growing so rapidly that this month imaging has required a section in the Digest to itself.) But Motorola has already made and demonstrated a monitor far superior to LCD and plasma. The prototype is only 5″ in diameter but it can be scaled up to much larger sizes, and will cost much less than LCD monitors.

Not only are technologies rapidly evolving new powers and forms: entire branches of science are too. Expect major surprises from the new science of “superchemistry.”

Technological acceleration is of practical and not just academic interest. Those of us born BI (Before the Internet) know that its first blessing was faster communication and its second was to link more of us together. Both blessings have recently been exploited in a novel way to gather blood and tissue samples from patients far away, facilitating the discovery of a gene mutation that causes three related kinds of bone marrow cancer.

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All the equipment you need to do molecular biology in your garage is available (used, but cheap) on eBay, BestUse, and LabX websites, and reagents and protocols through DNAHack’s website. “If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months – the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time,” says Rob Carlson, a senior scientist at the University of Washington, in Wired. You will also need real skills, but don’t despair — to help you is “a wide variety of lab automation tools for sale. For a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can purchase boxy-looking robots with spindly arms that handle platefuls of samples, mix and distribute reagents – and make a fine martini. Some of the units are sophisticated enough that you can teach them all the new tricks published in fancy journals.”

You will also need to know something about gene sequencing. Again, there’s help in the form of bioinformatics programs available “all over the Web,’ so that “in no time you’ll be tweaking genome sequences on your computer late into the night.” You will soon be able to order genetic parts suitable for use in E. coli from the synthetic biology group at MIT and assemble them into control systems for biological computation, or to program the bacteria to produce proteins and other compounds. For plant genetics, “head to BioForge.”

You are unlikely to be able to acquire all the equipment necessary to create a hazardous organism, says Carlson, but his article will hardly assuage even the mildest paranoia, especially when he writes that you can design a viral or bacterial genome and order the whole sequence online from Blue Heron Biotechnology, which will FedEx you the DNA. There is some comfort in knowing that Blue Heron will at least check for known nasties before shipping it to you, but what of unknown nasties? And what of the fact that you will be able to bypass Blue Heron’s guardians of humanity when microfluidic DNA synthesizers hit the market? “These have already been used to write sequences equivalent in size to small bacterial genomes, a capability currently limited to a few academic and industrial labs – but not for much longer,” says Carlson.

DNA Sequence in 3 days/$5K

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Today, it would take about 100 state-of-the-art sequencing machines working six months at a cost of US$20-$30 million to sequence an individual’s genome. Startup Helicos BioSciences is spending $27 million of venture capital funding to have a machine on the market by early 2007 that will sequence a whole genome in three days at a cost of $5,000.

Nano TVs/Monitors

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Motorola Labs have developed a working 5-inch color video display prototype based on carbon nanotube technology. The breakthrough is expected to scale to large, flat panel displays with superior quality, longer lifetimes and lower costs than current flat-panel displays. The real breakthrough was in Motorola’s discovery of a way to grow carbon nanotubes directly on glass, producing an energy-efficient and cost-effective design producing high brightness, excellent uniformity, and color purity. A Motorola executive said the technology “could enable the next generation of large size flat panel displays to deliver an extraordinary visual experience at a fraction of current prices.” One analyst has estimated the manufactured cost for a 40-inch panel at under US$400.

Superchemistry

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The team that in 2003 created an exotic new form of matter called a Fermion superfluid, which exists only at temperatures near absolute zero (-459.6 degrees Fahrenheit), has now shown how to arrange that matter into complex molecules.

The synthesis of ultracold molecules is so new, it is difficult to predict potential applications, but it gets off to a flying start a new field called superchemistry, in which scientists seek to control the pairings and interactions of the atoms and molecules in Bose-Einstein condensates. As ultracold molecules are synthesized into complex quantum objects, phenomena hidden at the subatomic scale will now become visible almost to the naked eye, thus opening up a whole new realm of physical and chemical possibilities.

Web-based Cancer Research Success

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US researchers used the Internet to solicit and obtain a large number (345) of blood DNA samples and cheek tissue from patients with myeloproliferative disorders (MPD — bone marrow cancers), and as a result were able to discover a genetic mutation that may help in the development of targeted, molecular therapies for the deadly condition, for which there is currently is no effective treatment.