The Source of the Data Flood: Sequencing Technologies

Where does this huge amount of data come from? What are the costs of producing it? The answers to these questions lie in the impressive development of sequencing technologies, which have opened up many research opportunities and challenges, some of which are described in this issue. DNA sequencing is the process of “reading” a DNA fragment (referred to as a “read”) and determining the exact order of DNA bases (the four possible nucleotides, that are Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine) that compose a given DNA strand. Research in biology and medicine has been revolutionised and accelerated by the advances of DNA and even RNA sequencing biotechnologies.