DNA

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, chain-termination sequencing is now routinely used to sequence DNA fragments. With this technology, researchers have been able to study the molecular sequences associated with many human diseases. As sequencing has become less expensive and with the aid of computational tools, researchers have sequenced the genomes of many organisms by stitching together the sequences of many different fragments (a process called “genome assembly”). These technologies were used to sequence the human genome, leading to the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003.

The large amount of sequences available has created the field of “genomics,” research which uses computational tools to search for and analyze patterns in the full genomes of organisms. Genomics can also be considered a subfield of bioinformatics, which uses computational approaches to analyze large sets of biological data.