What exactly is Sanger sequencing?

Today's GenomeWeb contained an item on yet another genome sequencing startup, Genome Corp (which was the name proposed for the first genome sequencing company). Genome Corp is being started by Kevin Ulmer, who has been involved in a number of prior companies (for a quite effusive description, see the full press release).

Ulmer is an interesting guy. I heard him speak at a commercial conference once & he had the chutzpah to put up the famous Science 'and then a miracle occurs' cartoon with reference to his competition, and then launch into a description of his own blue sky technology. If I remember correctly, it involved capturing nucleotides chewed off by exonuclease & then cooling them to the liquid helium range. Not that it can't be done, but it wasn't actually a high school science fair project either.

The technology is described as "Massively Parallel Sanger Sequencing", with the comment that Sanger is responsible for 99+% of the DNA sequences deposited in GenBank. I hadn't actually thought about it before, but I probably annotated somewhere north of 50% of the bases generated by what would have been the runner-up method a few years back, Maxam-Gilbert, due to some genome sequencing projects run while I was a graduate student. Multiplex Maxam-Gilbert sequencing actually knocked off a few bacterial genomes, but those were corporate projects which were kept proprietary (by Genome Therapeutics, whose corporate successor is called Oscient) -- and those were annotated by a version of my software. Never thought to toot that horn before!

It also reminded me that somewhere I saw one of the other next-generation technologies (I think it was Solexa's) described as Sanger sequencing. Which leads to the title question: what is the essence of Sanger sequencing? I generally think of it as electrophoretic resolution of dideoxy-terminated fragments, but if you think a bit it's obvious that Sanger's unique contribution was the terminators; Maxam-Gilbert used the same electrophoretic separation. So, by that measure, Solexa's method is a Sanger method. On the other hand, ABI's SOLID isn't (ligase, no terminators) nor is 454's (no terminators). 454 could be accomodated by stretching the definition to using a polymerase and unbalanced nucleotide mixtures to sequence DNA, but that seems a real stretch.

The press release didn't really give much away, and a patent search on freepatents didn't find something quickly (though it did find another scheme of Ulmer's using aptamers, a periodic idee fixe of mine) There have been publications describing minaturized, microfluidic Sanger sequencing schemes retaining size separation as a component (e.g. this one in PNAS [free!]), so perhaps its in that category.


The funding announced is from a public (or quasi-public) fund supporting new technology in Rhode Island. It's not really commuting range for me (not that I'm looking for a change), but it is nice to see more such companies in the neighborhood. There's at least one other Rhode Island based next-next generation sequencing startup I've seen, so perhaps the smallest state will yield the biggest genomes!