Workshop: The utility of next generation sequencing for genome scale studies

Molecular biological enquiry has entered a new age in the last few years with the development of high-throughput, massively parallel data acquisition platforms. Since it's advent with the introduction of gene microarrays early in this century, the technology has continued to evolve at an astonishing pace into sequencers capable of millions to billions of sequencing reads in one instrument run. After introducing the platforms, applications and advances in next generation sequencing technologies, I will discuss our involvement with several genome sequencing initiatives, focusing more closely on the tammar wallaby genome project.