DEC 28, 2018

What is Sanger Sequencing?

WRITTEN BY: Carmen Leitch

You may have heard of Sanger sequencing, a common tool used in the genetics laboratory to decode the sequence of a strand of DNA. It was created in 1977 by Frederick Sanger and his colleagues. While there are newer ways to sequence DNA, it’s still frequently used in the lab, Although there are a variety of reasons why it’s still employed instead of more recently developed technologies, it’s often selected simply because generating a few Sanger sequencing runs makes more sense for many small projects than using high-throughput next-gen sequencing methods. 

This video from Thermo Fisher Scientific describes and illustrates exactly what Sanger sequencing is and how it works.