Unlocking the Genetic Code - The Revolution of Next Generation Sequencing
Next Generation Sequencing Next generation sequencing refers to modern DNA sequencing technologies that parallelize the whole genome sequencing process. Over the past decade, Next Generation Sequencing has revolutionized genetic research and enabled breakthrough discoveries across multiple fields of science. Emergence of High-throughput Sequencing The field of genomics was transformed with the introduction of Sanger sequencing in 1977 which allowed researchers to read DNA strands one base pair at a time. However, Sanger sequencing was low throughput and decoding an entire human genome would take over a decade. The desire for more efficient sequencing led to the development of Next Generation Sequencing technologies around 2005. These modern techniques allow scientists to sequence millions of DNA fragments simultaneously using arrays or sequencing by synthesis approaches. This massively parallelization of the sequencing process has made Next Generation Sequencing exponentially ...