By Peter Weiss
In what some scientists are describing as the most sweeping innovation in gene sequencing in the past 25 years, researchers have developed a tool that can read out DNA’s genetic letters up to 100 times as fast as the standard technique does.
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“It has the potential to really change the way we do things with genomes,” says H. Chad Nusbaum, codirector of genome sequencing and analysis at the Broad Institute, a genetic research center jointly operated in Cambridge, Mass., by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.