Pushing the Sanger Envelope

With the help of new materials, traditional Sanger sequencing could get a speed boost and still remain complementary to emerging non-Sanger techniques. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Northwestern University showed that incorporating derivatives of linear polyacrylamide into a Sanger sequencing system cut DNA read times by 67%.¹

Although the advance does not put the processing power of Sanger sequencing on par with newer, massively parallel sequencing technologies, the discovery would still improve the speed of a significant portion of academic research-a market that many biotech sequencing companies believe will remain Sanger-centric...