“Sequencing is always a bit of an art,” says Bart Barrell, who 20 years ago helped pioneer the technology used to determine the molecular makeup of DNA. For many like Barrell, now a sequencer at the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, U.K., the most challenging part of the job is “finishing”—the final stage in which fragments of raw DNA data are arranged into a completed sequence. Even as robots and computers take over the grunt work, this last step still requires an experienced eye and an innovative mind. Reliance on skilled finishers is “a very big issue” for labs seeking to scale up, says Robert Waterston of the genome center at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Elizabeth Pennisi (1998) studied this question.
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