Peter D. Olson

Introduction: studying diversity in an era of ubiquitous genomics

Just as scientific discoveries enable the development of new technology, novel technologies can drive scientific progress. Similar to the adoption of PCR as a mainstream laboratory technique in the 1990s, the ability to readily sequence whole genomes today has opened up new areas of biology and fundamentally changed the way people work in existing fields. The most obvious feature of so-called ‘next generation’ sequencing (NGS) technologies (a misnomer that includes a wide array of platforms developed over the past decade) is the enormous increase in throughput of sequence data, resulting in an unprecedented reduction in cost. A single sequencing ‘run’ of a high-end platform can generate up to 5 billion reads and determine the sequence of 1500 billion bp of DNA – the equivalent of 500 human genomes – in 3 to 4 days. The US National Human Genome Research Institute has tracked the changing price of DNA sequencing they fund from about

Phylogenomics of Nematoda

5000 per Mb to 5 cents per Mb over the last 15 years: a 100 000-fold drop (see Fig 1). At the time of writing (2015) the sequencing equipment market is dominated by Illumina, and a relative lack of competition and the maturity of the current technology has at least temporarily slowed the fall in price. However, the development of newer sequencing platforms is expected to soon spark another era of rapidly declining prices and rising throughput. This enormous technological progress has been a boon for many areas of biology, but the change in technology has also required researchers to change the