Since this is my first posting on Nature Network let me introduce myself—my name is Nathan Blow and I work for the Nature Publishing Group as the technology editor for Nature and Nature Methods writing tech features for both journals.

I thought I would make the first posting on an area of technology development that has been capturing my attention/imagination along with a lot of press lately – next-gen sequencing. The advances in this area have been nothing short of amazing. When I started graduate school in 1997, all the sequencing I did used either S-35 or P-32 and the enzyme Sequenase. I was thrilled when I could read 400 bases for a reaction. And even with automated sequencers available at this time, it still took warehouse-sized rooms filled with hundreds of these machines to decode a single human genome.

Flash forward ten years and I write a tech feature for Nature on genomics focusing on next-gen sequencing technology. These new systems are capable of producing the equivalent of a third of the human genome in a single run (1 to 4 Gigabases in most cases) from one machine. Although issues like read length are still being solved for applications such as de novo sequencing, the data is here now and the short read-lengths seem to be working.

But now developers are trying to move beyond even this tremendous output. Several weeks ago a company called Pacific Biosciences made a huge splash at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting when they announced the development of a system they claim will be able to deliver 100 Gigabases/hour by 2013. I did not miss type….100GB/hour is the prediction. Other developers are working on different technologies for a genome in less than an hour, but they all have the same goal—a fast, ‘$1000-genome’. And most developers think this is a very realistic. If you are interested in the technology behind Pacific Biosciences system—it is a very interesting approach to single molecule sequencing—check out Methagora, the Nature Methods blog, for technical details.

Some of you out there may have had the chance to use these new systems (Illumina, ABI, 454….anyone?), while many of you probably have not. But I am very curious to find out what everyone thinks about these developments and their potential to advance personal genomics and medicine. Is too much effort going into developing faster sequencing methods right now? Will you want your genome sequenced in the future, along with all the insights that could bring?