The Personal Genome Maker (credit: Ion Torrent)

The mythical “$1,000 genome” will be here next year, said Jonathan Rothberg, CEO of sequencing technology company Ion Torrent, at MIT’s Emerging Technology conference, Technology Review Mims’ Bits reports.

The rate at which genome sequencing has become more affordable is faster than Moore’s law. “By this time next year, sequencing human genomes [will be] as fast and cheap as bacterial genome,” said Rothberg, and can now do an entire bacterial genome in about two hours.

This Personal Genome Machine technology works almost entirely through microchip technology instead of wet chemistry. It is already being used to determine which mutations are present in the genomes of patients’ cancers.