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It was just over three years ago when one of the first next-generation sequencers was delivered to an academic lab, marking the beginning of a new era. That first system was the commercially available Genome Sequencer 20, developed by 454 Life Sciences, sold by Roche, and delivered to a group of academic labs in the summer of 2005. At first, the research community believed that there were few applications that could be done with the original 100 base-pair sequencing reads, stating that they were too short. Then the research community found novel applications like small RNA detection and the sequencing of DNA from ancient samples. The research community also found that having access to hundreds of thousands of sequencing reads overcame the short read length.

The DNA sequencing market has changed rapidly over the last three years with the introduction of at least three more commercial providers of next-generation sequencing systems. The individual platforms continue to improve as seen with the Genome Sequencer System; the platform that originally provided 200,000 sequencing reads of 100 base pairs in length now delivers sequencing reads that are nearly 500 base pairs in length with over 1 million individual reads. With these order-of-magnitude advancements, researchers are beginning to ask questions that they merely dreamed about just a few years ago. Now, as a community, we are looking at the idea of sequencing 1,000 human genomes, sequencing all the species within a given genus, and sequencing the 1 trillion microbes that inhabit the human body.

It is these types of projects that are accelerating our understanding of the biological world, and which Roche is happy to be supporting. We bring you this collection of articles to highlight recent scientific and technological advancements in next-generation sequencing and the possibilities that are enabled by these advancements.

Timothy Harkins, Ph.D.
Marketing Manager, Roche Applied Science
Roche Diagnostics, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Next generation sequencing generates hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of sequencing reads per instrument run. These platforms generate digital outputs, replacing the traditional Sanger sequencing reads. A single sequencing read is the result of a single DNA molecule, representing true molecule sequencing.

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