- What modern techniques trace their conceptual origin to Morgan's chromosome maps?
DNA Sequencing
Methods for reading the order of nucleotides in DNA.
- What second Nobel Prize did Sanger win in 1980, and for what method?
- What modern medical technologies, like PCR testing, trace their origin back to Kornberg's discovery of DNA polymerase?
- What modern technologies, from gene therapy to PCR testing, depend on the decoded genetic alphabet?
- How did an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus enable the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)?
- Why did DNA polymerase need to be heat-stable for Kary Mullis's PCR technique to work?
- How did Sanger's chain-termination method use modified nucleotides to determine the sequence of bases in DNA?
- Why did Sanger's sequencing method scale better than Gilbert's chemical method, and what large-scale project did that scalability eventually enable?
- Who else besides Frederick Sanger has won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry?
- What did Leroy Hood's automated DNA sequencer, introduced in 1986, make possible that hand methods could not?
- Why did automated DNA sequencing turn the Human Genome Project from a feasibility question into a logistics one?
- What agencies signed the memorandum that formally launched the Human Genome Project, and what was its budget and timeline?
- Why was it uncertain in 1990 whether sequencing three billion base pairs was even technically achievable?
- How far ahead of schedule did the Human Genome Project finish, and what did it make possible for later biology?
- How does the polymerase chain reaction turn a tiny DNA fragment into a billion copies?
- What role do primers and a heat-stable polymerase play in each PCR cycle?
- Why did PCR make same-day testing possible during a pandemic decades after its invention?
- How does whole-genome shotgun sequencing reconstruct a genome from randomly shattered fragments?
- Why did many scientists doubt the shotgun approach would work before Venter's team proved it out?
- How large was the international collaboration that sequenced the yeast genome, and how long did it take?
- Why was C. elegans considered an ideal organism for sequencing an entire animal genome?
- Why was chromosome 22 chosen as the first human chromosome to be completely sequenced?
- What did it mean for the sequence to be 'complete' rather than a draft with gaps and errors?
- Which two teams independently produced a working draft of the human genome in 2000?
- How many protein-coding genes did the completed analysis find, and how did that compare to predictions?
- Why does the human genome having a gene count similar to a roundworm matter?
- What made Arabidopsis the first plant genome to be fully sequenced, in December 2000?
- Why did it take until the early 2010s for non-invasive prenatal testing to reach clinical use?
- What is whole-genome shotgun sequencing, and why did the scientific establishment consider Venter's approach reckless?
- What was significant about Venter becoming the first person to have his genome sequenced by name?