Does that mean we may be able to see an early version of OUR OWN GALAXY?? o_0

Not having read TFA, I could be wrong, but it sounds like an array-based detection system..

You absolutely cannot multiplex PCRs for that many targets, so it has to be an array, right?

There may be some non-specific PCR, or other form of 'amplification' i.e. in vitro transcription, done beforehand to amplify the starting matierial (in fact, this would probably be required since array sensitivity is crap compared to PCR).

Yeah, if you go with the big companies like Telstra, Optus etc. you will get screwed like you are getting screwed by Vodafone. Here in Australia the best ISPs are those that don't charge by usage, and have reasonable caps for ok money. i.e. mine (iiNet, at the risk of sounding like a salesdouche) is $50 a month for 100 GB (50GB peak and 50 off-peak), at ADSL2+.

Telstra would be asking a LOT more money for that, and they wonder why I keep telling them to where to go when they call me and ask for my custom.

Which is one of the reasons Telstra shares are plummeting.

Have you even read Ayn Rand? She may have been a right-wing cracker, but her utopian hideaways (e.g. in Atlas Shrugged) involved a payment system for hard work. Her little crew of elite businesspeople may have been snobs but they weren't thieves.

Actually, if the genes are identical in terms of nucleotide sequence then it is absolutely irrefutable that they are of the same origin. Even genes that are evolutionarily conserved vary in sequence between members of the same genus, let alone organisms from completely different kingdoms of life.

I hear ya, it's exciting stuff... Just to add a twist, it should be noted that the vast majority of mutations found in tumours that have been fully sequenced so far occur outside protein coding regions. Not to say protein coding genes are not important, but it's likely that mutations in intergenic regions, promoters, noncoding RNA 'genes' and introns are also likely to play a major role in transformation to a cancerous phenotype in many cases.

The issue is going to be getting enough data for statistical robustness, even before any candidate mutations are investigated in the wet lab. I wonder how many thousands of each type of tumour should be sequenced? In any case, there will be buckets of data getting pumped out of the next generation of next-gen sequencers pretty soon, so plenty of work for bioinformatics nerds in the near future!

Woah! Easy there tiger, do you expect us to read the entire summary??

Give /.ers some credit, perhaps the title could have been a little more concise in anticipation of the usual knee-jerk comments.

Maybe it's 98.01% (0.99 squared!).

Game devs FTW!

Aren't a lot of developers making a lot of money as a direct result of the tight controls apple has placed on iphone apps?

Isn't that a good thing for indy developers and small companies?

Shouldn't devs be applauding apple's approach instead of trashing it at every opportunity?

probably need a few hundred more links..

Nice idea, but phage are also very good at facilitating horizontal gene transfer, so there's a chance they could make the problem worse by conferring resistance to other strains of related bacteria.

Despite not having read TFA, the synopsis seems to imply that all Gram negative bugs are potentially superbugs because their cell walls are different to Gram +ve bacteriia. In fact, most Gram -ves are susceptible to penicillin (and other beta-lactams), just like their Gram +ve cousins, because their cell walls still contain peptidoglycans, albeit less than the average Gram +ve organism.

Sure LPS might be inflammatory but that doesn't make all (e.g.) E.coli pathogenic - it's the aquired attachment/invasion/toxin genes that confer pathogenicity. Similarly, it's the aquired antiobiotic resistance genes that are important in most cases of multiple resistance.

It has been said before and will be said again -- nothing to see here folks, move along.

Um, cloning genes into plasmids and propagating them in E.coli so that you can manipulate (mutate) the sequence invariably requires some kind of antibiotic selection. Letting people muck around in their garages with plasmids conferring antibiotics resistance in bugs that have the potential to become resident in your intestines and persist indefinitely in the environment is a horrendously bad idea.

It's why all labs that do this stuff routinely are required to adhere to physical containment guidelines.

Pretty fucking scary indeed.