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Population sequencing projects and industrial sovereignty : One small step for Europe, one giant leap for China
The China National GeneBank operated by BGI In the race to collect vast amount of genetic data – seen as a vital step to fulfill the promises of genomics, Europe is on the move, uncoordinated, its member-states launching large sequencing projects one after the other. But the key technology to do this – a high-end instrument called massively parallel sequencer, is mostly imported from the US at great cost and, unlike China, who came up with a plan to gradually reduce its reliance, a continental strategy is painfully lacking. par Vincent Lorin ———- Like Erysichthon, the Thessalian king, cursed with the plight of insatiable hunger, geneticists’ appetite for human genomes seems unquenchable. Drowning already in an ocean of data – whose baffling complexity they’re still struggling to comprehend, they keep screaming for more. No other field, aside astronomy, generates such a deluge of it. The power of genomics, they say, lies in large datasets; which, after careful analysis, can lead to uncover hidden patterns in the DNA and unveil correlations between gene mutations and diseases, which, in turn, […]
