Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-1259419-20150217114529/@comment-76.168.102.70-20151014065801

Just a heads up from this end. I'm an engineer for Ion Torrent (owned by Thermo Fisher as part of the Life Technologies brand), which is the company that makes the Proton sequencer. For the purposes of the movie, they used the Proton only to give the image of a DNA sequencer (so, yes, your conclusion that the XB-20 and Proton are one and the same is correct). In the JP universe, the Ion Proton doesn't exist.

This is because, in real life, it is impossible to produce the kinds of results that they claim in the movies (shocking, right? =P). With the highest throughput chemistries and working pretty hard at it, you would be able to sequence ~3% (an exome) of an entire human genome in one day (the entire genome is about 3 billion base pairs). The actual sequencing time on the instrument would only be about 4 hours.. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as putting a drop of blood onto the chip and pressing play. There is quite a bit of sample prep and lab work that must be done before you can get sequenceable sample.

Since there is no accurate or in-tact dinosaur genome for us to currently study, it's tough to say how large a dinosaur genome would be (but many studies have been done that theorize them to be anywhere from 1.5 to 3 billion bases) but you certainly couldn't sequence it in its entirety in a single day, let alone in an hour. It's just not possible, even with today's technology.

Also.. The conicals (tubes) don't have colored liquids in real life ;)