(August 2003) Today, in the age of molecular biology, the study of an organism’s genome (its complete DNA) is a central component driving our understanding of biology. When scientists first considered studying genomes they were faced with a problem: how to reproducibly cut a genome’s DNA into fragments that were small enough to handle? It was a significant problem. Genomes are composed of large DNA chunks on the order of millions of units, while a scientist could reasonable only handle pieces of DNA a few thousand units long. A discrepancy far too large to bridge, thus a method for reproducibly…