Lined Up To Be Sequenced

A Reuters story looks into sequencing and health research, particularly focusing on the UK Biobank, a project that aims to enroll 500,000 people to have their DNA sequenced and their health tracked over time. The biobank investigators hope to find rare variants linked to common diseases, building on the work of others, including Decode. Another area of particular interest for sequencing technologies, the article continues, is cancer. "Cancer is maybe the best disease to cut our teeth on," Yale's Richard Lifton tells Reuters. "The reason for that is we know that cancer is largely a disease in changes of DNA sequence." This sidebar to the article also gives a run-down of the big sequencing and analysis players.