Only 10 years ago, deciphering the genetic information from one individual in a matter of weeks to find a certain disease-causing genetic mutation would have been written off as science fiction. It was the time of the Human Genome Project, and it had taken armies of sequencing robots working around the clock for almost a decade to unravel the complete sequence of the human genetic code – referred to as the genome – by churning out the DNA alphabet letter by letter.Now a team headed by Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona applied Next Generation Genome Sequencing to decipher the entire DNA from a patient who had died from sudden unexplained epileptic death.
