A collaborative project between the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the John Innes Centre in Norwich has led to the landmark sequencing of the Streptomyces coelicolor genome
A collaborative project between the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the John Innes Centre in Norwich has led to the landmark sequencing of the Streptomyces coelicolor genome, as published in Nature in May 2002.
Scientists at the Sanger Institute have partly attributed the success of this project to the vast improvements in technology for sequencing in recent years.
David Harris, a Sequencing Team Leader in the Pathogen Unit of the Sanger Institute, explained: "The project to sequence Streptomyces coelicolor began back in 1997 when sequencing was still an expensive thing to do.
The costs have come down enormously with the advent of high throughput technology and both the instruments and sequencing chemistries we use have improved fourfold in the last six years.
Although we have used the same instrument supplier in all this time, we started sequencing on slab gel machines and have progressed through two further models and on to high throughput capillary systems.
Each new instrument has represented an enormous step forward in throughput, sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratios. The Sanger Institute has in total over 140 capillary sequencers and the pathogen unit has 13 of them." Once generated, the sequencing information is passed to Stephen Bentley, Senior Computer Biologist.
He commented: "As far as a research resource is concerned, it is very important to have data that is reliable.
Not all sequencing projects are finished to the same degree of accuracy which can lead to a level of doubt in the back of your mind.
With the sequencing data produced here and submitted to the public databases, people can feel very confident in its reliability.
Over the years we have had two or three instances where researchers have queried a difference in base reads at a particular point in the genome, but we invariably have ample coverage of sequence reads of that region and are absolutely confident that our results are right!" David continued: "The systems we use are found in any academic laboratory but what sets the Sanger Institute apart is the number of machines it has and the way they are operated - 24 hours a day, seven days a week, very much a production line.
The technology lends itself to that kind of use.
You can load the instruments up, push a button and walk away and we have the confidence in them to let them run virtually unattended for 24 hours."
