DNA sequencing and genomics

One of the most fundamental technologies developed to study genetics, DNA sequencing allows researchers to determine the sequence of nucleotides in DNA fragments Developed in 1977 by Frederick Sanger and coworkers, the sequence of chain termination is now routinely used for DNA fragments With this technology, researchers were able to study the molecular sequences associated with many human diseases

As sequencing has become cheaper, the researchers have been sequencing genomes of many organisms, using computational tools to put together a number of different fragments (a process called genome assembly) This technology is used to sequence the human genome, leading to the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 The new high-throughput sequencing technology dramatically lowering the cost of DNA sequencing, with many researchers hope to bring the human genome resequencing cost a thousand dollars

The large amount of sequence data available has created the field of genomics, research that uses computational tools to search and analyze patterns in the genome of an organism is full Genomics can also be regarded as a subfield of bioinformatics, which uses computational approaches to analyze large sets of biological data