But there’s a profit motive: it hopes to identify patients with specific rare DNA errors and steer them to drug companies. Strata, which was founded last year and has raised $12 million from ...

The work, however, did identify some shortcomings on the sequence side. A common file format used to hold DNA data, for example, isn't specced to handle sequences this long.

Building off the powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, researchers have created a new tool that can target and change a single letter in a sequence of DNA.