Foreword

Genome science has become essential in advancing knowledge in the wide field of biological and clinical research. The eBook 'Advances in Genome Science' is intended to provide the community with a multi-disciplinary and accessible view of some of the latest developments in the field, allowing readers to capture the relevance and diversity of genomics.

Emerging in the 1980s with the availability of exiting new techniques that allowed larger systematic studies of more than one gene, gaining speed in the 1990s with the genome projects and today, going through a period of conceptual and technological refinement and differentiation. Genomics is at the brink of yielding the scientific and medical progress the public and the research communities in basic, applied and clinical science have been hoping for and expecting.

The challenges that still lie ahead are great and the best use of the possibilities of genomics will be necessary to tackle them and provide solutions to urgent medical and environmental problems. While the substantial investment in large scale genomics studies has repeatedly been discussed in critical terms, genomics researchers as a result can now focus on the evaluation of the valuable, comprehensive datasets that have been generated. Theoretical approaches have started to yield testable models of biological processes, hypothesis-driven investigation into disease mechanisms or signaling pathways has been provided with exiting new leads, identification of new therapy targets has a broader, more detailed knowledge base to start from.

‘Advances in Genome Science’ allows a look at the cutting-edge genomics approaches in use today that bridge the gap to translational science and personalized medicine and are certain to change the way we think about genetic information even more.