PLoS ONE Prokaryotic Genome Collection - now launched

I am excited to tell you of the latest collection of some of the high-impact articles, the PLoS ONE Prokaryotic Genome Collection. Liz Allen of PLoS, has some more things to say …read her full blog post here.

There is an editorial overview that accompanies the new collection; it’s written by me. Comments related to the collection and the ‘overview’ have started to trickle in, such as this one by Dr Ramy Aziz:

“This article lists very interesting challenges and questions that will be answered in the next decade of this millennium. With the revolution stirred by next-gen sequencing machines, sequencing/resequencing steps have become quick and cheap. Thus, data generation is the least part to worry about. However, as the article appropriately discusses, the problem is what to sequence and then how to make sense out of the piles.

We will very soon have 5,000 fully sequenced prokaryotic genomes, but, as quick annotation tools are being developed, we realize very well that more genomes annotated = more errors propagated.

In addition to high-speed and high-performance …” … Read more here.

Genomes of scientific hubris multiply: After Venter's, here is Watson's

Nature today published genome of James Watson. Well it sounds good news more for Watson after going through one of the major controversies of his life. Otherwise the article perhaps appears much like a ‘closed access’ version of a previous PLoS Biology article detailing Craig Venter’s genome.

These mighty projects denote a competition between the ‘genome giants’ although Venter managed to be ahead of Jim Watson. While the new genome finding is more or less confirmatory of the previous individual's genome biology, the only difference what I can see is that the latter study employed new generation sequencing strategy; massively parallel sequencing.

Perhaps the most practical outcome of these studies shall be the decipherment of chunks of new single nucleotide and copy number polymorphisms and the construction of long-range haplotypes.

From a genetic health perspective, however, it is difficult to foresee how these data will be informative about or indicative of the future health of these two 'old men'. This casts shadows of uncertainty over the practical implications of such studies and it will be interesting to look if or not they will pave the way for 'personalized genomics' to usher in a new challenging discipline. If it does, there shall be much of a great biotechnology ahead, as well as community genomics in the microbial world, individual genomics in the human world and the amalgamation of the two, for example - we should be ready in a few years to see their individualized microbiomes and microbial-human interactomes !