I have been saying for a little while now that cheap ultra-high-throughput sequencing is going to revolutionize biology. Both Solexa and 454 technologies have already been used to reveal huge numbers of small RNAs, including novel classes (Aravin et al, 2007;Ruby et al, 2006;Rajagopalan et al, 2006) and the presence of miRNAs in unicellular organisms (Zhao et al, 2007).
Now Solexa sequencing has been used to map protein-DNA interactions using chromatin-immunoprecipitation (ChIP), with what looks like impressive accuracy (Johnson et al, 2007).
In parallel, 454 technology (pyrosequencing) was used to sequence James Watson’s genome, in two months and for less than $1M (NY Times article).
