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The pyrosequencing or 454 sequencing, in its commercial version can read up to twenty million bases per run by implementing the technique on picotiter plates that promotes sequencing of huge amounts of DNA at lower cost in comparison to earlier techniques. On the other hand, one most important drawback to the pyrosequencing method is incomplete extension of repeats of the similar nucleotides (such as AAAAAAA). Each read is only about 100 bp (base pairs) long and makes it hard for the researchers to distinguish among the repeated regions which are longer than this length. Still the pyrosequencing technique is improving rapidly, and latest machines are able to generate 400 bp sequence reads.

The important applications of pyrosequencing technique includes, but not limited to, identifying species and detect antibiotic resistance, quantifying DNA methylation performed as never before, gathering valuable data in a variety of studies of clinical genetic syndromes and also to achieve reliable genetic analysis in the study of a wide variety of hematological conditions. The strengths of the pyrosequencing techniques compared to other techniques is that it has built in quality control, easy communication of information, assays for any genetic marker , mutation tolerant assays, flexible range of methods, quantitative genotyping data and finally simple to use reliable platform.

DNA sequencing technologies both older and new ones have furnished humans with the information regarding many of the genomes. Starting in the 1970s, the Sanger sequencing method made it possible for the scientists to sequence stretches of DNA at faster speeds. Additional sophistication and automation of this process continued to enhance sequencing rates thus allowing scientists to accomplish the most important milestones in the Human Genome Project. At present, new methods such as pyrosequencing have significantly cut down the sequencing cost and may possibly in time allow each person to have one’s information regarding the genome.