ABSTRACT
Methods for DNA sequencing were invented multiple times, ¥rst by chemical means (Maxam and Gilbert, 1977) and later using biochemical approaches (Sanger and Coulson, 1975). Initially, radioactive compounds were used to make the DNA bands, which represent base pairs (bp), detectable by autoradiography a©er an electrophoretic separation. A major step forward was the switch to £uorescent labels in the 1980s, which could be detected during the electrophoretic separation and automatically recorded by computers, instead of humans reading autoradiograms, which were then manually converted to computer ¥les. Naturally, the manual editing necessary for the creation of the early DNA sequence ¥les led to a high error rate, which should be kept in mind when comparing DNA sequences downloaded from public repositories, such as GenBank.
