Next Generation Sequencing Platforms and its Applications in Genomics

DNA sequencing technology is undergoing a revolution with the commercialization of next genera-tion technologies. Over the past eight to ten years massively parallel DNA sequencing platforms have become widely available with reducing the cost of DNA sequencing. Next generation platform (NGS) includes Helicos Heliscope™, Pacific Biosciences SMRT, Ion Torrent, Oxford Nanopore, etc. These plat-forms have the potential to dramatically accelerate biological research, by enabling the comprehensive analysis of genomes, transcriptomes and interactomes to become inexpensive, routine and widespread. Variant discovery by re-sequencing targeted regions of interest or whole genomes, de novo assemblies of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. Cataloguing the transcriptomes of cells, genome-wide profiling of epigenetic marks and chromatin structure is using other seq-based methods and species classification and gene discovery by metagenomics studies.