I have not heard of a 454, but this seems to dovetail nicely with the recent report of a group being able to clone a mouse from tissue stored without using any special cryopreservation techniques. http://www.scientistsolutions.com/science-blog_a2a946ed-b7e8-4b7f-be61-3124d40e3115.aspx The chance of someone cloning a viable specimen of an ancient extinct species during my lifetime get ever smaller! What species would you like to see brought back from the past and why?

454 is a large-scale sequencing system most frequently used for whole genomes. A small fragment of DNA (e.g fragments chopped genome from a newely isolated bacterium) is blunted and ligated to adapters on both side, one of the adapters is biotinylated and can be captured onto a streptavidin bead. Now the DNA is denatured and one of the strands is washed off creating sstDNA library beads. sstDNA beads are added to DNA bead incubation mix (with polymerase) and enzyme beads and placed into picotitre wells. The four nucleotides are placed sequentially such that addition of a nucleotide (if complementary)by DNA pol. generates a light signal, read for each well by the instrument. Addition of more that one nt causes increase in the intensity. The machine used for 454 sequencing is called Genome Sequencer FLX by Roche. Upto 600 megabases could be sequenced in every 10 hour run. Several genome sequencing institutions (http://www.genome.duke.edu/cores/sequencing/ being used for fungi genomes)use this technique for sequencing of new genomes or resequencing.