perspective What would you do if you could sequence everything? Avak Kahvejian1, John Quackenbush2 & John F Thompson1 It could be argued that the greatest transformative aspect ing technologies, be leveraged with insightful approaches to biology and of the Human Genome Project has been not the sequencing medicine to maximize the benefits to all? DNA sequence is no longer just of the genome itself, but the resultant development of new an end in itself, but it is rapidly ing the digital substrate replac- technologies. A host of new approaches has fundamentally ing analog chip-based hybridization signals; it is the barcode tracking of changed the way we approach problems in basic and enormous numbers of samples; and it is the readout indicating a host of translational research. Now, a new generation of high-throughput chemical modifications and intermolecular interactions. Sequence data sequencing technologies promises to again transform the allow one to count mRNAs or other species of nucleic acids precisely, to scientific enterprise, potentially supplanting array-based determine sharp boundaries for interactions with proteins or positions technologies and opening up many new possibilities. By allowing of translocations and to identify novel variants and splice sites, all in one urebiotechnology DNA/RNA to be assayed more rapidly than previously possible, experiment with digital accuracy. these next-generation platforms promise a deeper understanding The brief history of molecular biology and genomic technologies has of genome regulation and biology. Significantly enhancing been marked by the introduction of new technologies, their rapid uptake sequencing throughput will allow us to follow the evolution and then a steady state or slow decline in use as newer techniques are of viral and bacterial resistance in real time, to uncover the developed that supersede them. For example, as measured by publica- huge diversity of novel
