In the past two years, methods to sequence DNA faster and cheaper gave scientists the ability to "bring sequencing back into the lab," says Neil Hall, professor of Genomics at the University of Liverpool, and to ask genome-wide questions that would have been too expensive and time consuming using traditional Sanger sequencing at one of the large sequencing centers worldwide.
Each of the new sequencing methods, one marketed by 454 Life Sciences (published in a 2005 Hot Paper that has been cited 246 times, Nature 437:376-81, 2005) and another by Illumina, has preferred applications, says Elaine Mardis, codirector of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The longer read lengths of the 454 method make it better for sequencing molecules de-novo, while Illumina's Solexa instrument is ideal for shorter fragments.
Hall says neither method has yet surpassed Sanger sequencing in combining all the metrics of quality, including ...
