Assessing the Value of Next-Generation Sequencing Technologies: An Introduction

The first human genome sequencing project cost $2.7 billion and was declared complete in 2003, after 15 years of international cooperation and collaboration between several research teams and funding agencies. Today, with the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, the cost and time of sequencing a human genome have dropped over 100 fold.
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features....

Hybridoma technology is used for the large-scale production of monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies bind to only a single antigenic determinant or epitope. Such antibodies are used in research, diagnostics, and disease therapy. The hybridoma technology established in 1975 by Georges Köhler and Cesar Milstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1984 for revolutionizing research and therapy.
Hybridoma Selection
Commonly used fusion techniques — electroporation,...

Cis-regulatory sequences are short fragments of non-coding DNA that are present on the same chromosomes as the genes that they regulate. These fragments serve as binding sites for transcriptional regulators, proteins that are responsible for controlling gene transcription and differential gene expression across cell types in eukaryotes. Cis-regulatory sequences can be close to the gene of interest or thousands of bases away in the DNA sequence; however, those sequences that are further away are...

Sequences are fundamental mathematical objects consisting of ordered lists of numbers that follow a specific rule or pattern. Sequences are critical in various mathematical concepts, including calculus, series, and number theory. They can model real-world phenomena such as population growth, financial investments, and physical processes like the diminishing height of a bouncing ball.Each number in a sequence is referred to as a term. Typically, the terms are denoted as a1, a2, a3,…, where...

DNA sequencing is a fundamental technique that is routinely used in the biological sciences. This method can be applied to a range of questions at different scales - from the sequencing of a cloned DNA fragment or the study of a mutation in a gene up to whole-genome sequencing. However, despite the widespread use of sequencing today, it was not until 1977 that Fredrick Sanger and his collaborators developed the chain-termination method to decode DNA sequences. It relies on the separation of a...

An arithmetic sequence is a structured arrangement of numbers where each term is derived by adding a constant value, known as the common difference, to the previous term. This consistent pattern allows for the efficient computation of any term within the sequence as well as the cumulative sum of multiple terms. The formula for finding the nth term of an arithmetic sequence is:Here, aₙ represents the nth term of the sequence, a is the first term, d is the common difference, and n is the...