Genome Mapping Gets a Price Cut

Want your own personal genome sequenced? Researchers said they have found a faster and less expensive way to do it that would cost only about $2.2 million.

George Church and colleagues at Harvard Medical School hope eventually to reduce the cost to $1,000 per genome -- the entire DNA code of a person, plant or other organism.

Their new method, described in the current issue of the journal Science, bypasses the traditional gel-based technology for analyzing DNA and instead uses color-coded beads, a microscope and a camera.

It is considerably less expensive than the current methods, which cost about $20 million for a human genome.

In a report published online Monday in the journal Nature, a separate group of researchers announced a different way to sequence DNA that is 100 times faster than current methods.