In a scientific premiere, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) geneticists managed to determine the DNA sequence of a woman, identified as Dr. Marjolein Kriek, geneticist at LUMC. The in-depth analysis and the sequence will be made public at a later date.

The sequencing took six months to complete, and it was done with the help of the Illumina 1G equipment at the Leiden Genome Technology Center, belonging to Leiden University Medical Center and the Center for Medical Systems Biology.

A DNA sequence is in fact the structure of a DNA molecule, capable of retaining information, represented as a succession of letters, each derived from the four nucleotide subunits in the DNA. In this particular analysis, the Illumina 1G equipment read approximately 22 billion base pairs or letters.

DNA sequencing is a mean of establishing the order of these four letters, which sometimes can be accompanied by other letters, representing portions of DNA with still unknown functions. The DNA sequence is the key to the development of all organisms.

It’s more or less like a will: it holds heritable genetic information about the development of all living organisms.

Scientists have been working on human DNA sequencing on four male subjects only, so it was time for a female DNA sequencing as well. The project was valued at approximately $40.000, but it will take even more money and time (possibly another 6 months) to finish the in-depth analysis.

In 2001, scientists managed to publish the DNA sequence of four males, one of which was Jim Watson, who was discovered to have a double helix structure. So far, there have been no reactions from the scientific community on the latest study of DNA sequencing, but reactions are to be expected as more details will be made public.