An article in the January/February issue of MIT's Technology Review rounds up what's been going on in the genomics area -- what technology has been speeding the work up and what impact genomics could have on medicine. In particular, the article wonders about how data from projects like the Personal Genome Project will be handled. "The greatest challenge in the next phase of human genomics is likely to be interpreting the meaning of the seemingly endless array of variations that will be uncovered," the article says.
In that same issue, Elaine Mardis writes that sequencing will affect how people think about cancer. She describes how her group sequenced both cancerous and normal tissues from someone with acute myeloid leukemia and found 10 genes that may play a role in that cancer. She also adds that next-gen sequencing will also allow researchers to compare transcriptomes of cancerous and normal tissues. "The acceleration of cancer-related discoveries that will result from using next-generation sequencing will dramatically increase the potential for developing more such tests," Mardis writes.