'Genomic Anarchy'? We're In!

In his response to a recent Forbes article — which makes projections about the future of sequencing and profiles Ion Torrent's Jonathan Rothberg — Mike the Mad Biologist stresses that a "sequencing revolution" and a "genomics revolution" are not one and the same. Sequencing, he says, "is the easy part." Even assembly is no longer the strenuous task it once was. Annotation and analysis, however, are "not trivial in terms of computation." Mike says that although "high-throughput sequencing is an essential component," it cannot fuel the so-called genomics revolution alone. Looking forward, Mike expects standardization to be an obstacle for annotation. In fact, he predicts that without standardization of both raw genomic data and its associated metadata, "we won't have a genomic revolution, but genomic anarchy."