Berkeley, Calif. ? The relatively low cost of sequencing the genome of a Chinese man and an African man brings ever closer the prospect that average people can see their full genetic blueprint, according to separate studies published this week in the journal Nature.

“You will have your genome sequenced, and I will have my genome sequenced,” predicted Rasmus Nielsen, an associate professor of biology at University of California Berkeley, who was a co-author of the Chinese genome study.

The plummeting costs of genome sequencing means an individual’s genetic data will likely be used far sooner than expected to assess disease susceptibility, or to tailor more effective drug regimes.

Nielsen and UC Berkeley colleagues Ines Hellmann and John Pool are the only U.S.-based authors of the article. The other collaborators were scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute and other Chinese institutions, as well as British researchers.

“No one predicted the price would go down so fast that the sequencing of genomes for medical purposes would happen in my lifetime,” Nielsen stressed.

The two genomes sequenced thus far and made publicly available – those of genetics luminaries James Watson and Craig Venter – cost hundreds of millions of dollars each using an older technology, Nielsen said.

In contrast, it cost less than $500,000 to decode the Chinese male’s genetic blueprint, he said. The team of scientists decoding the African man’s sequence described the endeavor as “low cost.” Both used a technique called “next-generation sequencing” that’s far less laborious and time consuming than the older technique.

“In a few years, you can do it for a few thousand,” Nielsen said. In the coming decades he estimated human genome sequencing costs will drop to “a few hundred dollars.”

Genetic information on the healthy, anonymous males – one a Han Chinese and the other a member of the Yoruba ethnic group in Nigeria – also adds crucial information on genetic diversity among humans.

This latest effort to sequence non-Europeans joins a separate international initiative, announced in September, to sequence 100 Arab human genomes.