“The new technologies will sequence a person’s DNA quickly and cost-effectively so [they] routinely can be used by biomedical researchers and health care workers to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human disease,” NHGRI said in a statement.

Halcyon collaborators’ recent paper, “Atom-by-atom structural and chemical analysis by annular dark-field electron microscopy” illustrates the power of modern electron microscopy:

Direct imaging and chemical identification of all the atoms in a material with unknown three-dimensional structure would constitute a very powerful general analysis tool. Transmission electron microscopy should in principle be able to fulfill this role, as many scientists including Feynman realized early on. It images matter with electrons that scatter strongly from individual atoms and whose wavelengths are about 50 times smaller than an atom. Recently the technique has advanced greatly owing to the introduction of aberration-corrected optics. However, neither electron microscopy nor any other experimental technique has yet been able to resolve and identify all the atoms in a non-periodic material consisting of several atomic species. Here we show that annular dark-field imaging in an aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope optimized for low voltage operation can resolve and identify the chemical type of every atom in monolayer hexagonal boron nitride that contains substitutional defects.

Read the full article at the Nature website.  More than 60 years after Feynman visualized seeing individual atoms with electron microscopy, it has finally become possible.

The National Human Genome Research Institute recently awarded $18.4M to 10 groups working on next-generation sequencing technology. One of these awardees was Dean Toste at UC Berkeley, a collaborator of Halcyon Molecular. Here’s an excerpt from the write-up at Genome Web:

Toste’s group, another new grantee, will collaborate with Halcyon Molecular to develop reagents for selectively labeling DNA bases with heavy atoms for sequencing by transmission-electron microscopy.

The aim is to sequence a human genome with reads of more than 150 kilobases, high consensus accuracy, and lack of sequence-specific bias. Eventually, it should be possible to sequence a human genome accurately and completely in fewer than 10 minutes at a cost of less than $100, according to the grant abstract.

The researchers said they plan to perform proof-of-concept experiments first, using NMR spectroscopy on individual DNA bases. Then, they want to test their reagents on single DNA strands and sequence them by TEM.

Earlier this year at NHGRI’s Advanced Sequencing Technology Development meeting in Chapel Hill, NC, a company researcher showed that the firm has developed a method for arraying long single-stranded DNA on a substrate and is working on reading its sequence by TEM.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the technology, email us.

Read more at Tech Crunch.