Interviewee: John Sulston. Nobel Laureate John Sulston, a key figure in the UK sequencing effort, talks about breaking DNA apart so that the sequence can be reassembled. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Public consortium > The public sequencing process)

To think about this you have to realize that DNA is long, fragile, the only way to deal with it is to blast the pieces in one way or another. We call that the process of shotgun. What the public labs used was what we call a hierarchical shotgun, so we first of all broke it into pieces of a, one to two hundred thousand bases in length. We took, we then did what we called mapping, which was arrange these pieces, find out where, how they fitted together to make the genome, and then take a suitable series of these pieces one by one and then again shotgun, blast into small pieces to get down to the sequence-sized fragments of about two thousand.

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