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The Human Genome Project relied on dideoxy sequencing, developed by Nobel laureate Fred Sanger, Alan Coulson and colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the late 1970s. Sanger sequencing ingeniously used trace amounts of dideoxy nucleotides to halt the synthesis of DNA strands at specific bases; by separating these radioactively labeled strands using polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, the native sequencing could be determined by reading the position of the bands on an autoradiograph. Sanger’s method outlasted a rival method developed by Allan Maxam and Walter Gilbert, who shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980 with Sanger. Key developments included the introduction of automated instruments using fluorescent dye labels and capillary electrophoresis. Commercial instruments were used in factory-like settings by genome centers and the sequencing firm Celera Genomics to produce the first draft of the human genome in 2000.