Progress in DNA sequencing

Abstract

The first human genome sequence took about a decade to complete and cost more than two billion dollars. This shows the major limitations of time and cost, and the development of recent technologies for DNA sequencing ultimately aimed at reducing these two factors. The major milestone of the HGP was the sequencing of the first billionth base out of the three billion base pair human genome. However, depending on the platform used in sequencing, the cost has drastically plummeted to about five thousand dollars and this is the work of a single day. The ultimate target of the HGP is to reach a one thousand dollar price mark to sequencing an entire human genome with the highest throughput, and this is slowly but steadily approaching, thanks to the refinements of existing methods, which are reducing the cost per base by the day. This review looks at the advancement of the DNA sequencing methods from the standard Sanger method, through to those applied in today’s research and also focuses on the technologies that have evolved throughout the past three decades with a possible comparison between them and finally a look at some of the limitations of these technologies.

Keywords: Human genome project, DNA sequencing, Sanger method