A USPO patent was recently issued for Polynucleotide barcoding, or simply put....tagging DNA.
Significance
Not only can we see the events inside a cell, in real time, [see Nano Resolution Bio-Imaging STORM now a reality or Peaking inside the workings of a cell: Live-Cell Imaging or Researchers watch brain cells in action in real time ], but we can now track individual molecules, with barcodes. This will likely accelerate the mapping of the SNPs and genetic markers and offer novel insights into specific disease events.
From the patent outline:
A polynucleotide is barcoded using a method whereby an isolated, individual polynucleotide is immobilized on a solid phase and stretched, targets are labeled using target-specific hybridization probes, and an individual label of an unamplified probe at each of the labeled targets is optically detected. The order of the labels is determined to form a barcode representation of the polynucleotide wherein the targets and their relative positions are represented.
[0003] With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome the scientific community is in a position to begin studying the relationship between genetics and disease in earnest. Several groups have already embarked on the first stage of such studies, a comprehensive mapping of the SNPs and genetic markers in the human genome. Using this information, a genome-wide scan of SNPs of a population can establish potentially interesting regions of the genome associated with a particular disease. However, in such results, there will be a high incidence of false positives due to the multiple-testing problem, and a high incidence of false negatives, due to weak correlation between single SNPs and a given disease. Therefore, after this stage, it becomes necessary to reexamine the identified regions with a finer-grained mapping of genetic features to confirm the previously established relationships. In these studies, the power to detect correlations is greatly increased by comparing haplotypes of the case studies, rather than just studying SNPs .
[0006] Over the past decade, technological advances have allowed biophysicists to study biological systems on a molecule-by-molecule basis, giving them the unprecedented capacity to resolve properties of complex systems that are obscured by measuring properties which are averaged over the entire ensemble. One approach to measuring properties of single molecules is through fluorescence. For instance, we have recently demonstrated the ability to localize single fluorescent molecules with very high accuracy (approximately 1.5 nm) with half-second time resolution over the course of several minutes. We refer to this technique as Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy (FIONA), and have used it to investigate the processive walking of the myosin V and kinesin and molecular motors labeled with Cy3. We have also shown that we can achieve similar results with a variety of different types of on both proteins and DNA, making FIONA a highly versatile technique.
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