Editorials

by Rajen Kumar

No Escaping Social Media

Running a magazine concentrating on issues of small and medium enterprises and managing with limited resources is a like living life on the edge. In this rush of meeting deadlines,...

Special Reports

Apr 2012

EMRC, Brussels Associates with SME WORLD as its New Media Partner

EMRC has promoted business partnerships with the developing world and has organised dozens of business forums in key decision-making cities, such as Amsterdam, Rome,...

Technology

Game Changer: A Low-cost DNASequencing Technology

Vimarsh Bajpai
Nov 2011

If innovation is the name of the game, Life Technologies has introduced a game changer. At its Innovation Update Forum in NCR, the company that operates in India as Invitrogen BioServices India Pvt Ltd, unveiled its next generation sequencing product – Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM).

Most sequencing technologies have their own set of limitations being targeted at the needs of researchers in the high-end laboratories. This mostly hurt the accessibility factor, limiting the reach to the majority of population. “Low-cost and speed” are the key features of this technology, Mike Lelivelt, Director of Bioinformatics and Software Products told SME World at its recent interaction with SME World.

Ion PGM improves the existing decoding equipment by replacing the complex optical module with a semiconductor chip. This results in the sequencing system that is simpler, faster, cheaper and more scalable than the technologies currently available. At the launch event, DevashishOhri, MD, Life Technologies South Asia said “Given the low-cost and the speed of analysis of Ion PGM, Life Technologies is hoping to democratize DNA sequencing, which so far has been a fairly time-consuming and expensive technique. Now with the PGM being well within reach and given its ability to produce large amounts of DNA sequence data in a short period of time, the company is optimistic about mass adoption of this technology.

This technology had helped scientists in Europe to discover within days a hybrid E-Coli bacterium that caused the outbreak in Germany and parts of Europe in June this year. This could have taken longer, in some cases weeks to identify the culprit bacterium if the old technology had been put into use. Developing counties such as India need low-cost innovative technologies to make the benefits of science available to the masses, and this technology is surely a big step in the right direction.

According to N K Mehra, Head of the Department of Transplant Immunology and Immunogenetics, “This PGM looks like an exciting and viable technology where you can generate gigabytes of sequencing in one go. I believe it would be a wonderful tool to understand genomic diversity of the pathogen.”

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