NEWS&ANALYSIS saying that this new technology would push the cost of a human genome below $1000, including labor, depreciation, and reagents. ìWe saw an emerging demand for population scale sequencing,î says Joel Fellis, a senior marketing manager at Illumina in San Francisco, California, such as the British plan to sequence 100,000 participants in its national health plan by 2017. There is a catch, however. Any buyer must order at least 10 machines and agree to use them only for sequencing human genomes. ìThat prices out a lot of general researchers,î says Zak Wescoe, a UC Santa Cruz bioengineer. And the $1000 cost requires that
all these machines run pretty much at full capacity. Not many places have a demand for 18,000 genomes a year, or the capacity to analyze that many sequences, says Elaine Mardis, co-director of The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. ìI donít know how you could sustain it.î Deanna Church, a genomicist with Personalis in Menlo Park, California, welcomes the advances at both ends of the cost scale. ìThereís going to be room for multiple players, and some technologies are going to lend themselves better to some applications over others.î –ELIZABETH PENNISI
U.S. SCIENCE POLICY
Antarctic Scientists Continue to Reel From Shutdown to spend money, NSF had to reverse direction and begin winterizing all its facilitiesó including labs, balloon launch sites, and ˇeld stationsóso they could be shut down for an indeˇnite period. The agency was already coping with the impact of sequestration, the 5% spending cut that took effect last March. NSFís budget for Antarctic research grants shrank from $68 million in 2012 to $64 million in 2013, and it remained frozen at that level under the temporary budget agreement that ended the shutdown and allowed NSF to get back to business in Antarctica. But the delay and the budget squeeze forced NSF to scale back a dozen projects and move an additional 17 projects into next season. Program managers will have to tap some Heading home. The cargo ship Maersk Illinois left Antarctica this month after of the money they had planned to spend on enduring an intense storm that wrecked the ice dock at McMurdo Station. the next round of grant ìWe lost a good month of our normal proposals to support the deferred projects. season,î estimates Scott Borg, head of And that means even stiffer competition for NSFís Antarctic science program. ìItís an those with new ideas. Earlier this month, opportunity cost that you canít put a ˇgure Borg tried to squelch rumors that the funding on.î The weather isnít helping either: Storm well was dry with a ìDear Colleagueî letter damage to an ice dock this month prevented that encourages scientists to submit proposals some scientists whose projects did go forward before the 15 April deadline. from shipping their samples. ìThe point of the letter was to say, ëHey, The shutdown, which began on 1 October things arenít that bad,í î Borg explains. ìYes, after Congress failed to pass a 2014 budget, we are facing some tough ˇscal realities Ö occurred just as NSF was preparing for the and weíll have fewer new starts next year. annual onslaught of scientists during the But we havenít gotten to the point of not short austral summer. Without the authority being able to do anything new.î The 16-day shutdown of the U.S. government this past October is a distant memory for most Americans. But scientists working in Antarctica continue to feel its negative effects. The shutdown triggered a logistics nightmare in a field season that ends this month, forcing the National Science Foundation (NSF) to scale back some projects and defer others. That move, in turn, will aggravate an already tight budget situation.
830
21 FEBRUARY 2014
VOL 343
SCIENCE
Published by AAAS
This year has been a real test for a team of meteorite collectors coordinated by Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Sequestration trimmed the size of this seasonís team by one-third. And in the wake of the shutdown, Harvey adds, ìNSFís desire to support people exceeded its grasp.î His team also felt the wrath of Mother Nature. Although good weather allowed them to make the most of a shorter collecting season, the 330 rock samples they amassed wonít be making it to a NASA lab in Houston, Texas, for at least a year. A storm last week took out the ice pier at NSFís McMurdo Station, preventing workers from loading freezers holding the extraterrestrial cargo onto a ship. ìI hate to use the term ëperfect storm,í but this was the last in a series of extraordinary events this season,î Harvey says. The shutdown also put a big crimp in the expected ˇnale of a multiyear effort to drill into the subglacial Lake Whillans, which lies under 800 meters of continental ice and flows into the Ross Sea. NSF decided to delay the WISSARD project because of its need for heavy logistical support: The team must travel by ice tractor on a 2000-kilometer round trip to the drilling site. Last month, NSF approved what Ross Powell, WISSARDís chief scientist, calls a ìcut-down versionî of the project for next January with a smaller team and only one borehole instead of three. Powell, a geologist at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, says heís also lost a promising graduate student who was so ìdemoralizedî by this yearís cancellation that heís leaving school to ˇnd a job. –JEFFREY MERVIS
www.sciencemag.org
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on June 11, 2015
he says. Some might try real-time analysis of microbes in food, as a precursor to food safety tests, or see how well MinION can read ancient DNA. Deamer wants to see if the device can process a single strand of DNA 16,000 bases long in one pass. ìWe are really going to challenge the instrument.î While Oxford Nanopore offers individual researchers a chance to experiment with a cheap, hand-held device, Illumina is about to sell high-end technology designed for just the biggest genome sequencing organizations. Last month, it introduced the HiSeq X, a million-dollar machine capable of sequencing 1800 human genomes a year,
all these machines run pretty much at full capacity. Not many places have a demand for 18,000 genomes a year, or the capacity to analyze that many sequences, says Elaine Mardis, co-director of The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. ìI donít know how you could sustain it.î Deanna Church, a genomicist with Personalis in Menlo Park, California, welcomes the advances at both ends of the cost scale. ìThereís going to be room for multiple players, and some technologies are going to lend themselves better to some applications over others.î –ELIZABETH PENNISI
U.S. SCIENCE POLICY
Antarctic Scientists Continue to Reel From Shutdown to spend money, NSF had to reverse direction and begin winterizing all its facilitiesó including labs, balloon launch sites, and ˇeld stationsóso they could be shut down for an indeˇnite period. The agency was already coping with the impact of sequestration, the 5% spending cut that took effect last March. NSFís budget for Antarctic research grants shrank from $68 million in 2012 to $64 million in 2013, and it remained frozen at that level under the temporary budget agreement that ended the shutdown and allowed NSF to get back to business in Antarctica. But the delay and the budget squeeze forced NSF to scale back a dozen projects and move an additional 17 projects into next season. Program managers will have to tap some Heading home. The cargo ship Maersk Illinois left Antarctica this month after of the money they had planned to spend on enduring an intense storm that wrecked the ice dock at McMurdo Station. the next round of grant ìWe lost a good month of our normal proposals to support the deferred projects. season,î estimates Scott Borg, head of And that means even stiffer competition for NSFís Antarctic science program. ìItís an those with new ideas. Earlier this month, opportunity cost that you canít put a ˇgure Borg tried to squelch rumors that the funding on.î The weather isnít helping either: Storm well was dry with a ìDear Colleagueî letter damage to an ice dock this month prevented that encourages scientists to submit proposals some scientists whose projects did go forward before the 15 April deadline. from shipping their samples. ìThe point of the letter was to say, ëHey, The shutdown, which began on 1 October things arenít that bad,í î Borg explains. ìYes, after Congress failed to pass a 2014 budget, we are facing some tough ˇscal realities Ö occurred just as NSF was preparing for the and weíll have fewer new starts next year. annual onslaught of scientists during the But we havenít gotten to the point of not short austral summer. Without the authority being able to do anything new.î The 16-day shutdown of the U.S. government this past October is a distant memory for most Americans. But scientists working in Antarctica continue to feel its negative effects. The shutdown triggered a logistics nightmare in a field season that ends this month, forcing the National Science Foundation (NSF) to scale back some projects and defer others. That move, in turn, will aggravate an already tight budget situation.
830
21 FEBRUARY 2014
VOL 343
SCIENCE
Published by AAAS
This year has been a real test for a team of meteorite collectors coordinated by Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Sequestration trimmed the size of this seasonís team by one-third. And in the wake of the shutdown, Harvey adds, ìNSFís desire to support people exceeded its grasp.î His team also felt the wrath of Mother Nature. Although good weather allowed them to make the most of a shorter collecting season, the 330 rock samples they amassed wonít be making it to a NASA lab in Houston, Texas, for at least a year. A storm last week took out the ice pier at NSFís McMurdo Station, preventing workers from loading freezers holding the extraterrestrial cargo onto a ship. ìI hate to use the term ëperfect storm,í but this was the last in a series of extraordinary events this season,î Harvey says. The shutdown also put a big crimp in the expected ˇnale of a multiyear effort to drill into the subglacial Lake Whillans, which lies under 800 meters of continental ice and flows into the Ross Sea. NSF decided to delay the WISSARD project because of its need for heavy logistical support: The team must travel by ice tractor on a 2000-kilometer round trip to the drilling site. Last month, NSF approved what Ross Powell, WISSARDís chief scientist, calls a ìcut-down versionî of the project for next January with a smaller team and only one borehole instead of three. Powell, a geologist at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, says heís also lost a promising graduate student who was so ìdemoralizedî by this yearís cancellation that heís leaving school to ˇnd a job. –JEFFREY MERVIS
www.sciencemag.org
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on June 11, 2015
he says. Some might try real-time analysis of microbes in food, as a precursor to food safety tests, or see how well MinION can read ancient DNA. Deamer wants to see if the device can process a single strand of DNA 16,000 bases long in one pass. ìWe are really going to challenge the instrument.î While Oxford Nanopore offers individual researchers a chance to experiment with a cheap, hand-held device, Illumina is about to sell high-end technology designed for just the biggest genome sequencing organizations. Last month, it introduced the HiSeq X, a million-dollar machine capable of sequencing 1800 human genomes a year,
