Genomics Comes of Age

摘要

Genomes carry the torch of life from one generation to the next for every organism on Earth. Each genome—physically just molecules of DNA—is a script written in a four-letter alphabet. Not too long ago, determining the precise sequence of those letters was such a slow, tedious process that only the most dedicated geneticist would attempt to read any one "paragraph"—a single gene. But today, genome sequencing is a billion-dollar, worldwide enterprise.