Solexa Sequencing: Decoding Genomes on a Population Scale

It is has now been some 17 years since David Klenerman and I (Fig. 1) conceived a project that would subsequently enable rapid whole human genome sequencing. The core thinking that led to Solexa Sequencing was sparked by observations made during basic exploratory research carried out in our laboratories during the mid to late 1990s, and the redirection of these observations toward DNA sequencing was an unintended consequence. The founding ideas and proof-of-concept experiments were carried out at the University of Cambridge. The first commercial sequencing system was subsequently developed at Solexa Limited, a company we founded in 1998. Illumina Inc. acquired Solexa in early 2007 and made further improvements that led to several new sequencing systems. Today, the technology is being used to routinely decode human genomes for medical research, clinical decision-making, and basic science, all at a cost and speed that make population-scale sequencing practical. The journey from concept to reduction to practice has already gone beyond my expectations in terms of performance, adoption, and early insights, yet the era of clinical whole genome sequencing is perhaps only just beginning.