FLICKER/EDUARDO MUESES

Math News posted 7/1/09 | 2 comments

DNA Sudoku

A 2,000-year-old math theorem, along with Sudoku, may soon help researchers untangle DNA at blazing speeds.

Hunting for a particular genetic mutation in hundreds of thousands of specimens can be an expensive and time-consuming process. In the past several years, faster multiplex DNA sequencing machines have sped up the acquisition of data, but researchers have still been hobbled by having to label each sample with a unique molecular identifier (or bar code) for analysis.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, N.Y., are proposing a new take on a very old idea to tackle large data sets simultaneously. [more]