Five years after publication of two drafts of the human genome, Maynard Olson of the University of Washington finds himself longing for another "lurch." To be sure, genomic scientists across the world have chalked up many achievements since 2001, but, like many of his colleagues, Olson is feeling more impatient than celebratory.
Progress has included a blizzard of comparisons between the human sequence and many others, including the chicken, the mouse, the rat, the dog, and the chimp. The flourishing of comparative genomics, says Olson, has changed the focus of genomics from a single reference sequence of genes to a rich variety of "functional elements," largely sequences that serve as ignition switches, brakes and accelerators for gene expression. And the focus on single-base changes has widened to an array of evolutionary rearrangements: insertions, deletions, reversals, and duplications. There are new tools: new global databases of all functional elements in genomes ...
