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"I’ve been collaborating with computational biologists since before genomics was genomics,” says Ross Hardison, a comparative geneticist at Pennsylvania State University. Back then, “we called it molecular cloning,” he says.
Hardison began working on genomics in the 1980s, when algorithms for aligning DNA sequences could only handle 10,000 base pairs, he says. Long strings of sequences were still spliced together by hand—“with effort”—and many biologists doubted whether generating enormous amounts of genomic data was even worthwhile.
“Many people thought we should stay focused on small model systems. They didn’t want to drown in a sea of sequences,” Hardison remembers. Although he and his colleagues could tease apart some regulatory pathways in a few organisms, without better comparative tools they could only guess whether their findings ...
