QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s):
Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents

First published online April 20, 2007
Journal of Experimental Biology 210, 1518-1525 (2007)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2007
doi: 10.1242/jeb.001370

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Glossary Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Related articles in JEB Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Hall, N. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Hall, N.

Review Article

Advanced sequencing technologies and their wider impact in microbiology

Neil Hall

School of Biological Sciences, Biosciences Building, Crown Street, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK

e-mail: neilhall{at}liv.ac.uk

Accepted 13 March 2007

In the past 10 years, microbiology has undergone a revolution that has been driven by access to cheap high-throughput DNA sequencing. It was not long ago that the cloning and sequencing of a target gene could take months or years, whereas now this entire process has been replaced by a 10 min Internet search of a public genome database. There has been no single innovation that has initiated this rapid technological change; in fact, the core chemistry of DNA sequencing is the same as it was 30 years ago. Instead, progress has been driven by large sequencing centers that have incrementally industrialized the Sanger sequencing method. A side effect of this industrialization is that large-scale sequencing has moved out of small research labs, and the vast majority of sequence data is now generated by large genome centers. Recently, there have been advances in technology that will enable high-throughput genome sequencing to be established in research labs using bench-top instrumentation. These new technologies are already being used to explore the vast microbial diversity in the natural environment and the untapped genetic variation that can occur in bacterial species. It is expected that these powerful new methods will open up new questions to genomic investigation and will also allow high-throughput sequencing to be more than just a discovery exercise but also a routine assay for hypothesis testing. While this review will concentrate on microorganisms, many of the important arguments about the need to measure and understand variation at the species, population and ecosystem level will hold true for many other biological systems.

Key words: comparative genomics, microbe, mutation screening, metagenomics, genome sequencing, bacteria, microorganism

Related articles in JEB:

DEEP SEQUENCING AND NEW CONCEPTIONS

Laura Blackburn
JEB 2007 210: i. [Full Text]  

This article has been cited by other articles:

				H. Noguchi, T. Taniguchi, and T. Itoh MetaGeneAnnotator: Detecting Species-Specific Patterns of Ribosomal Binding Site for Precise Gene Prediction in Anonymous Prokaryotic and Phage Genomes DNA Res, October 21, 2008; (2008) dsn027v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. Montgomerie, J. A. Cruz, S. Shrivastava, D. Arndt, M. Berjanskii, and D. S. Wishart PROTEUS2: a web server for comprehensive protein structure prediction and structure-based annotation Nucleic Acids Res., July 1, 2008; 36(suppl_2): W202 - W209. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]