Development of a Novel Genome Analysis Method Based on Scanning Probe Microscopy

Abstract

Recently, in the field of genome sequencing, next generation DNA sequencers are becoming available, and even the genome sequence analysis of a higher animal and/or a plant can be finished within a short period. However, the next generation DNA sequencers can only read relatively short sequence, which causes difficulty in the assemble step (i.e. reconstruction of original genomic sequence) and makes it labor and time consuming process and results in the long time requiring for gene isolation and breeding. When a target organism does not have enough genomic information, the assemble becomes much harder or not possible. This difficulty is arisen from the absence of positional index of the obtained nucleotide sequences by a whole genome shot-gun method. Therefore, we started the development of a new, scanning probe microscope based genome analysis method that can acquire the nucleotide sequences with positional indexes on the genome.