History

The Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC), formerly the Stanford DNA Sequencing and Technology Center, has been funded since 1993 by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI; and its predecessor) of the U.S.A. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Ronald W. Davis, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the Stanford University Medical College is the Director of the SGTC.

The SGTC was originally funded with two primary missions:

• To design and build instrumentation and to invent novel technologies to increase the throughput and decrease the cost of   large-scale DNA sequencing and genomic analyses.
• To participate in the international consortium sequencing the genome of the model eukaryote, baker's yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Meeting our goals

The SGTC has received numerous patents for the instrumentation and the software that we have developed. The instrumentation, robotics, and software that we have invented and/or developed have been transferred from Stanford University to the commercial sector by the Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing. Such instrumentation often carries the SUTECH^® logo, which was developed in conjunction with the Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing. As a direct result of these activities, the SGTC is an ongoing major contributor to a whole new industry, that of commercial genomics. Current activities toward the first goal is described in detail on the SGTC Technology Development Group pages. As of this writing (April 2004), the SGTC has spun-off 10 companies and has several ongoing collaborations.

The genome sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae S288c was completed by the international collaboration, released to GenBank, and published in 1996. The SGTC contributed 872 kb of fully finished DNA sequence: all of chromosome V, a substantial portion of chromosome IV, and a tiny portion of chromosome XVI. Further information about the Saccharomyces cerevisiae S288c genome can be obtained by accessing the Saccharomyces Genome Database. Since the successful completion of the S. cerevisiae genome sequence, the SGTC has completed, and published, two bacterial genome sequences, those of Chlamydia trachomatis and C. pneumoniae. The SGTC has been a major participant in the international Malaria (Plasmodium falciparum) Genome Project and the Arabidopsis thaliana (model plant) Genome Project. Both of these genome sequences have been published in the journal Nature. We also participated (in a small way) to the Human Genome Project. As of this writing (April 2004), we are preparing the Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans genome sequences for publication.

The success of our efforts has been driven by the ability of the SGTC to attract an interdisciplinary team of physicists, computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to work alongside biologists, biochemists, and physicians for the purpose of employing genomics approaches to attack fundamental problems in biology and medicine. This interdisciplinary approach gives the SGTC a unique ability to identify future technology needs and to develop and implement those technologies.

In 2000, we changed the name of our center to the SGTC to reflect a shift in our focus. With NIH-funded large-scale DNA sequencing now consolidated at a few very large centers, we are concentrating on developing new technologies for functional genomics, particularly for complex genomes such as human.