Practice question

Traditional Sanger sequencing resolution was limited by denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis that separates fragments differing by one nucleotide. Under optimal conditions with long gels or capillary electrophoresis, reliable read length reaches approximately 800 to 1000 base pairs before band broadening, signal decay and polymerase dissociation reduce accuracy. Hence routine Sanger reads are considered about 1000 bp, substantially longer than 100 bp but far shorter than 10000 or 100000 bp. Those very long reads belong to third-generation platforms such as PacBio or nanopore, which exceed Sanger capabilities.