James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

With all these new third generation sequencing technologies coming out in 2010, hopefully someone will sequence the pineapple genome. If not, maybe the cost of sequencing will drop enough while I’m in grad school that I can sequence the genome myself ( a guy can dream).

An incredibly overused graph, but the reason it’s so overused is that it really is a remarkably useful dataset. Source: https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/

Although I was a bit overly optimistic back in 2010 about how fast the cost of sequencing (and critically assembling) genomes would decline. Back then we are all talking about sequencing prices dropping 10x every 1-2 years. This turned out of be a quick burst of innovation brought about by second generation sequencing technologies (primarily 454 at first, then Solexa which became Illumina later on). Like many technologies, there was a lot more low hanging fruit for optimization early on, and the cost of sequencing essentially plateaued from 2011 to 2015.

Of course now we’re finally starting to get those economically viable 3rd generation sequencing technologies I though were right around the corner in 2010. And they still have lots and lots of headspace for optimization (pacbio and oxford nanopore being the two most successful ones at the moment) that maybe in another 6-7 years grad students really will be able to generate genome assemblies on a whim.

In the meantime, hey, we did get a pretty cool pineapple genome assembly a couple of years ago.

https://twitter.com/CygnusPlantXray/status/848882758692724736

Evidence of my ongoing obsession with pineapples.

Science is fun.

Editor’s note: Robert VanBuren, second author on the pineapple genome, and first author on at least one of dozen or so published grass genome sequences got his own research group out at MSU working on CAM photosynthesis and drought. Check it out!