Illustration by ExhibitEase LLC - Steven W. Marcus
Mammoth Achievement
Forget Jurassic Park. By successfully sequencing the DNA of a long-extinct species, Stephan Schuster and Webb Miller have helped push back the boundaries of molecular biology.
— By David Pacchioli
Stephan Schuster was never all that interested in ancient DNA. As a young genomicist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in his native Germany, his forte had always been bacteria. By deciphering and comparing the genomes—the genetic blueprints—of various microbial species, he sought to unlock the secrets of these ubiquitous creatures: how they evolve and interact with the organisms that play them host.
Schuster’s early work had attracted considerable attention. In particular, a study done with colleagues in Germany and England in 2004 laid bare the fascinating life cycle of Bdellovibrio, a predatory microbe whose efficient dispatching of its rivals suggests the promise of a "living antibiotic." But when Schuster accepted an offer to join Penn State’s Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics in 2005, he knew he had a decision to make. "I had to rebuild my lab," he remembers. "And I had already learned that there was a big change in technology about to happen." This change was the emergence of a next-generation DNA-sequencing machine, brainchild of a biotech start-up in Connecticut named 454 Life Sciences.
The automated "reading" of DNA sequences—the paired strands of nucleotides, or bases, that make up our genetic alphabet—had long depended on a chemical process developed by the British biochemist Frederick Sanger back in 1977. The so-called Sanger method had transformed biology, birthing the field of genomics and culminating in the successful decoding of the entire human genome, completed in 2003. But the sheer costliness of Sanger sequencing had placed strict limits on its use.
