Genotyping
Devils' Disease and Diversity
25/03/11 13:37 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Pennsylvania State University's Stephan Schuster and his colleagues aim in a conservation effort called "Project Ark" to help save the endangered Tasmanian devil — whose population is dwindling due to the rapid spread of a species-specific infectious cancer, devil tumor facial disease — using a genomics-based approach to genotype up to 500 Tasmanian devils. S. Pelech comments that with about 40% of the world's estimated 10 million species of life facing extinction, one of the real bonuses of plummeting genome-wide sequencing costs is the possibility it offers to remediate some of the damage that humankind has wrought on this planet in the future. The advantage of a database with the full sequences of thousands of diverse genomes is that it can be easily copied on a wide-scale onto small storage devices for broad dissemination, even into space. Read More...