Milestones

1953 A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper that first describes the double helical structure of DNA.
1962 Pauling’s theory of molecular evolution
1962 Watson & Crick get Nobel Prize for elucidating the double helical structure of DNA
1965 Margaret Dayhoff’s Atlas of Protein Sequences
1970 Needleman-Wunsch algorithm
1977 DNA sequencing and software to analyze it (Staden)
1981 Smith-Waterman algorithm developed
1981 The concept of a sequence motif (Doolittle)
1982 GenBank Release 3 made public
1982 Phage lambda genome sequenced
1983 Sequence database searching algorithm (Wilbur-Lipman)
1985 FASTP/FASTN: fast sequence similarity searching
1988 National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) created at NIH/NLM
1988 EMBnet network for database distribution
1990 BLAST: fast sequence similarity searching
1991 EST: expressed sequence tag sequencing
1993 Sanger Centre, Hinxton, UK
1994 EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK
1995 Methanococcus jannaschii genome sequenced; confirms existence of third major branch of life on earth
1996 Yeast genome completely sequenced
1996 Sequence of the human T-cell receptor region completed.
1997 PSI-BLAST
1997 Escherichia coli genome sequence completed
1998 Worm (multicellular) genome completely sequenced
1998 Fly genome completely sequenced
2001 Special issues of Science (Feb. 16, 2001) and Nature (Feb. 15, 2001) contain the working draft of the human genome sequence.
2002 Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium publishes its draft sequence of mouse genome in the December 5, 2002, issue of Nature.
2002 International consortium led by the DOE Joint Genome Institute publishes draft sequence of Fugu rubripes.
2003 Human Chromosome 14 Finished – Chromosome 14 is the fourth chromosome to be completely sequenced.