Journeys of Discovery: Rapid genome sequencing

Shankar Balasubramanian’s diary records 26 August 1997 as the day of “The Solexa Idea!” Sitting in the beer garden of the Panton Arms in Cambridge, he and David Klenerman sketched out their plans to watch DNA polymerase as it assembled the building blocks of life. Their ideas were progressing fast – and with them, something even more exciting. They realised that if they could watch the enzyme copying a genome then they were inadvertently also reading the genome. They had discovered a radically new way to sequence DNA that would be fast, accurate, low-cost and scalable. To make the technology more broadly available to the world, in 1998 they co-founded the company Solexa, which was acquired by Illumina in 2007. Today, rapid genome sequencing brings huge benefits to society. Coronavirus is tracked worldwide, diseases are diagnosed, crops are improved, and new therapies and vaccines are developed. We talk to the inventors about their journey of discovery.

Read more: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysofdiscovery-rapidgenomesequencing