Jay Shendure MD, PhD

Dr. Shendure’s lab is investigating how high-throughput technologies can have a transformative impact on biomedical research. They are broadly interested in developing new experimental methods and computational tools for the parallelized interrogation of biological systems. Ongoing projects in the laboratory make extensive use of new platforms for array-based, programmable DNA synthesis and massively parallelized, short-read DNA sequencing. As an M.D., Ph.D. student in Dr. George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Shendure helped develop polony sequencing, a highly parallel sequencing-by-ligation method that helped form the basis for Applied Biosystems’ SOLiD sequencer. In 2005, he published a landmark article in Science describing polony sequencing.

The term polony sequencing can be used to describe a variety of technologies including sequencing technology. Another term for it is ‘cyclic array sequencing,’ with this basic concept of arrays of features being sequenced in parallel, which uses a single reagent volume to manipulate all the features in parallel. His ensuing research focused on alternatives to PCR for selectively amplifying parts of the genome for sequencing.