Small, But a Big Deal

Using nanopores might speed up the sequencing process, says The Economist in this article about the technology. "My own vision is a 15-minute genome," says the University of Oxford's Hagan Bayley. "While you are being diagnosed at the hospital your entire genome would be sequenced." But, as The Economist points out, there's a long way to go until the technology gets to that point, and researchers are investigating using different types of nanopores as well as different ways to slow the movement of the DNA through the nanopores down so the bases can be detected. "Nanopores are tiny, but if they can be harnessed, the consequences could be momentous," The Economist says.