History
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The dideoxy chain termination method of DNA sequencing was developed by British biochemist Frederick Sanger, a twice Nobel Laureate, in 1977. The original paper describing the method, published by Dr. Sanger, can be found here: DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors. This method of DNA sequencing, also known as the Sanger method, was used to sequence human mitochondrial DNA (16,569 base pairs), the genome of the bacteriophage lambda (48,502 base pairs), the genome of the bacteriophage ΦX174 (5,386 base pairs; the first genome to be sequenced), and eventually, the entire human genome (~6 billion base pairs).
The Sanger method was the most widely used DNA sequencing method in the twentieth century and in the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, this method has several disadvantages: It is somewhat expensive, it requires a high concentration of DNA (impure DNA samples need to be PCR amplified beforehand), and it relies on gel electrophoresis so the number of base pairs that we can sequence in a single reaction is limited by the resolution of the gel. Hence, this method can be rather impractical for large-scale genome sequencing projects. As a result, it is gradually being superseded by more modern methods (known as next-generation DNA sequencing methods) such as Illumina sequencing and Ion Torrent sequencing.