Milestone 

Genomic Sequencing

The past two decades have witnessed extraordinary technological and computational advances in nucleic acid sequencing. This Milestone timeline provides a perspective of major genomic sequencing-related developments in the 21st century — from the first human reference genome, through methodological breakthroughs, to the impact of sequencing on fields as diverse as microbiology, cancer and palaeogenetics.

This Milestone is editorially independent, produced with financial support from a third party. About this content.

Coordinating editors:

Linda Koch, Nature Reviews Genetics

Catherine Potenski, Nature Genetics

Michelle Trenkmann, Nature

Writing editors:

Caroline Barranco, Nature Reviews Cross-Journal Team

Iain Dickson, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Joseph Willson, Nature Reviews Cross-Journal Team

Tiago Faial, Nature Genetics

Darren Burgess, Nature Reviews Genetics

Safia Danovi, Nature Genetics

Margot Brandt, Nature Communications

Ivanka Kamenova, Nature Protocols

Kyle Vogan, Nature Genetics

Andrew Cosgrove, Genome Biology

Aline Lückgen, Nature Communications

Rebecca Furlong, Nature Communications

Ingrid Knarston, Nature Communications

Ilse Valtierra, Nature Communications

Dominique Morneau, Nature Reviews Methods Primers

Brooke LaFlamme, Communications Biology

Katharine Wrighton, Nature Reviews Cross-Journal Team

Advisors:

Shankar Balasubramanian, University of Cambridge, UK.

Christopher Donohue, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, USA.

Eric D. Green, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, USA.

Chris Gunter, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, USA.

Erich Jarvis, The Rockefeller University, New York City, USA.

Janet Kelso, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Elaine R. Mardis, The Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Ohio State University, USA.

Karen H. Miga, UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.

Deborah Nickerson, University of Washington, USA.

Benedict Paten, University of California Santa Cruz, USA.

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Heidi Rehm, Massachusetts General Hospital and Broad Institute, Cambridge, USA.

W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA.

Rahul Satija, New York Genome Center and New York University, USA.

Jay Shendure, University of Washington, USA.

X. Shirley Liu, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University, USA.

Michael Snyder, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA.

Winston Timp, Johns Hopkins University, USA.

Rajeev K. Varshney, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Hyderabad, India.

Zhiping Weng, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, USA.