DNA technology has taken yet another step forward in its quest to unravel life's mysteries. The longest contiguous DNA sequence ever decoded has recently been deciphered by scientists at the Genome Sequencing Centre in St Louis in the US and the recently founded Sanger Centre in Cambridge, UK (Nature, Vol 368, No 6466).

The scientists have deciphered a sequence of 2,181,032 bases -- the basic blocks of a DNA molecule -- taken from a chromosome of a round worm (Caenorhabditis elegans), which easily beats the earlier longest sequence -- 315,316 bases of a yeast chromosome (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) decoded in 1992.