In the corner of Helicos BioSciences' ­offices in Cambridge, MA, a screen on the face of what looks like a giant refrigera­tor flashes a countdown: 10 days, five hours, and 51 minutes until it finishes reading the sequence of all the DNA that has been fed into it. The high-­throughput machine, a complex configuration of tubes, lasers, and chemi­cals, contains two plates, each with 25 ­microfluidic channels etched into it. Each channel is capable of holding and sequencing a separate DNA sample. Sequencing the samples in parallel, the machine takes just one hour to read 1.3 billion of the chemical "bases"--known as A, C, T, and G--that make up a strand of DNA.

Called the HeliScope, it is the first commercial instrument that can directly read the sequence of a single such strand, a capability that gives it the potential for unprecedented speed. In fact, says Stephen Quake, a bioengineer at Stanford University who cofounded the company in 2003, Helicos has "basically built the world's fastest DNA sequencer." Though it's not clear whether the machine will produce a complete sequence more rapidly than competing systems do (the data generated by a sequencing machine still has to be analyzed and stitched together, a computationally intensive task), Quake says it is "opening entire new areas of research."