Detour: A Short History of DNA Sequencing Technologies
Let’s learn how DNA arrays, sequencing bacterial genomes, and Hyseq were discovered.
We'll cover the following...
In 1988, Radoje Drmanac, Andrey Mirzabekov, and Edwin Southern simultaneously and independently proposed the futuristic and at the time completely implausible method of DNA arrays for DNA sequencing. None of these three biologists knew of the work of Euler, Hamilton, and de Bruijn; none could have possibly imagined that the implications of his own experimental research would eventually bring him face-to-face with these mathematical giants.
Sequencing bacterial genomes
A decade earlier, Frederick Sanger had sequenced the tiny 5,386 nucleotide-long genome of the φX174 virus. By the late 1980s, biologists were routinely sequencing viruses containing hundreds of thousands of nucleotides, but the idea of sequencing bacterial (let alone human) genomes remained preposterous, both experimentally and computationally.
Indeed, generating a single read in the late 1980s cost more than a dollar, pricing mammalian genome sequences in the billions. DNA arrays were therefore invented with the goal of cheaply generating a genome’s k-mer composition, albeit with a smaller read length k than the original DNA sequencing ...