A raw human sequence in less than three minutes, and a complete, high-quality sequence in just 15 minutes?

A new dimension to commercial next-generation sequencing applications - one that could potentially pose a threat to more-established microarray technologies - has been revealed in two recent papers.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience have discovered hundreds of sizeable tracts of DNA in the human genome that are 100 per cent identical in rats and mice, as if frozen across tens of millions of years of evolution.