Next-Generation Sequencing Methodologies

Abstract

Although many people believe that the American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick were the first to discover DNA in the 1950s, DNA was actually discovered by the Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher in the late 1860s during his attempts to isolate the protein components of leukocytes. But when he isolated a substance that was unlike proteins resistant to proteolysis and also had different chemical properties of proteins, including a much higher phosphorous content, he realized that he had discovered a new substance [1]. He called this new substance ``nuclein.''