Jonathan M. Rothberg, chairman of the board, says a single machine does the job of a $50 million sequencing center.

It uses "off-the-shelf instrumentation and reagents," the authors say, explaining how researchers can set up sequencing centers with mostly standard equipment.

Like most major genome projects, these efforts were collaborations between a large sequencing centre and the respective community of scientists.

However, this has changed as the software has grown more complex and as the number of sequencing centers has increased.

It can't become a fossilized sequencing center.

Sequencing is usually done in big sequencing centers with dozens of machines and dozens of people.

But this time, he said, the sequencing center will be not-for-profit, making its information freely available instead of selling it like Celera did.

But he said the sequencing center would eventually support itself on grants from the federal government and others.

This targeted sequencing is being performed by all three sequencing centers using hybrid-capture technology.

The various sequencing centers financed by the institutes have been reduced to four.