Friedberg notes DNA sequencing costs have fallen faster than Moore's Law over twenty years.
“Yep. Now digital technologies have driven the cost down of DNA sequencing faster than Moore's Law in the past twenty years.”
Friedberg states gut microbiome research has grown geometrically as DNA sequencing costs have dropped dramatically.
“So the number of papers on the gut biome has kind of grown geometrically last couple years.”
Friedberg explains DNA sequencing advances in the 1990s enabled first identification of bacterial populations in environments.
“in the '90s is kind of when DNA sequencing got cheap enough that we started to be able to figure out what bacteria are in an environment because before that, we didn't really have the ability to do that. So DNA sequencing lets us look at the DNA of all the bacteria,”