• Question: How do you proritise which organisms to sequence the DNA of? Does the time it takes to sequence the DNA vary between organisms?

    Asked by to Dave, Heather on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Dave Baker

      Dave Baker answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      This is Ben’s job at TGAC. He tries to schedule all the work we are doing. Some genome sequences are massive and complicated so even with today’s technology could take months to fully sequence. Some like bacteria genomes will sequence in hours, even minutes! Google ‘Pacbio’.

      We can put little bar codes on our sample so we mix them and chuck them on our machines and when the data comes out we can just grab the DNA with the same barcodes to split them back up again. Simples.

    • Photo: Heather Ritchie

      Heather Ritchie answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      My priorities will differ slightly from Dave’s due to the fact I specialise in particular animals for my own project rather than working with lots of other people and their interests. When I’m decided which organisms to sequence I have to consider what exactly I want to sequence and why. If I want to sequence smalls bits of DNA then I might have the resources to do this over several species but if I want to sequence large bits of DNA or if I want to sequence the genome of my animals I would have to select probably just the one species to sequence. The genomes of crustaceans are typically large so like Dave said it would probably take months to completely sequence the whole genome!

      We don’t have the big fancy machinery to do our own sequencing in my lab so I would be sending my samples to company who would do that for me. Recently I sent away small bits of DNA to get sequenced and it only took a day but I have also recently sent away a large sequencing project that will probably take about 4 weeks to be sequenced!

Comments