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A defining decade in DNA sequencing

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 1003–1005 (2014)Cite this article

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A revolution in DNA sequencing technology has enabled new insights from thousands of genomes sequenced across taxa.

For many years, Sanger DNA sequencing—a method that utilizes dideoxynucleotide analogs to halt template elongation, resulting in a ladder of fragments separable on a gel matrix—dominated the DNA analysis field. Its dominance was ensured by the introduction of fluorescent markers, which enabled the automation of sequence data collection. Incremental improvements on this basic concept produced a fully automated platform capable of generating 500,000 bases per day, enabling the first sequencing of the human genome in less than a decade. The Sanger sequencing instrumentation space was dominated then and now by a single vendor—Applied Biosystems, now under Life Technologies as part of Thermo Fisher Scientific—and these platforms are still the mainstay in clinical diagnostic DNA sequencing settings.

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Figure 1: Sequencing technologies are evolving, with many platforms now reaching maturity as a few others have failed or are being phased out.

Marina Corral Spence/Nature Publishing Group

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  1. John D. McPherson is in the Genome Technologies Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Toronto, Canada.,

    John D McPherson

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  1. John D McPherson
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Correspondence to John D McPherson.

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McPherson, J. A defining decade in DNA sequencing. Nat Methods 11, 1003–1005 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3106

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