Repeated denaturation and extension results in localized amplification of DNA fragments in millions of separate locations across the flow cell surface. Solid-phase amplification produces 100–200 million spatially separated template clusters, providing free ends to which a universal sequencing primer is then hybridized to initiate the sequencing reaction.[1][2] This technology was filed for a patent in 1997 from Glaxo-Welcome's Geneva Biomedical Research Institute (GBRI), by Pascal Mayer, Eric Kawashima, and Laurent Farinelli,[3][4] and was publicly presented for the first time in 1998.[5] In 1994 Adams and Kron filed a patent on a similar, but non-clonal, surface amplification method, named “bridge amplification”[2] adapted for clonal amplification in 1997 by Church and Mitra.[7][8]