Cold Spring Harbor meeting on The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half-Century of Progress

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is pleased to announce the fifth meeting in its History of Molecular Biology & Biotehcnology series. Entitled "The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half-Century of Progress", this meeting will address the origins and development of this powerful technology over the last five decades. The meeting will begin at 7.30 pm on Thursday July 16, 2015, and will conclude after lunch on Sunday, July 19. The opening session will include a tribute to Frederick Sanger, the father of DNA sequencing, and will cover the early efforts in protein, RNA and DNA sequencing. Other sessions will cover advances over the years in the capture of raw sequence information; the hurdles that had to be overcome to scale these methods to generate the millions of reads required for complex genomes; and the development of strategies and software development that converted these millions of reads into larger segments and, ultimately, whole genomes. Also covered will be the adaptation of DNA sequencing to measure a variety of biological functions and how the dramatic decrease of the cost of DNA sequencing has led to an increasing appreciation of the significance of human variation in health and disease and to improved undertanding of our evolution as a species. Each session will begin with a keynote talk by a leader in the field and will trace the develpoment of the topic from its origins to the present and beyond. The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Genentech Center Conferences on the History of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology aim to explore important themes of discovery in the biological sciences, bringing together scientists who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field with others whose interests may include the current status of the field, the historical progress of the field, and/or the application of these techniques and approaches in biotechnology and medicine. Previous meetings in the series have included: Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008) History of Restriction Enzymes (2013) Messenger RNA: From Discovery to Synthesis and Regulation in Bacteria and Eukaryotes (2014) Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)