There may be no invention more important to the smooth functioning of consumer commerce than the bar code, that pattern of skinny lines that turns a simple cash register into an impressive data-gathering device. Now, University of Wisconsin genome researcher David Schwartz hopes that DNA bar codes will be a similar shortcut for getting information about our health.
"You can take DNA molecules," says Schwartz, "and you can put a bar code onto these molecules very much the same way you can put a bar code onto frozen pizza."
As reported inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schwartz's system for putting bar codes on DNA is a little more complicated than just printing a series of lines onto a cardboard box. But in important ways, it's simpler than conventional DNA sequencing, which was the method used in the Human Genome Project.
To use an analogy, if our genome is ...
