A Road Map for our Journey through the Transcriptomic Maze

It has not escaped our mind that, in our writing so far, we did not explain what we intend to achieve here. Today we will take a brief pause from scientific topics to reflect on our limited goals.

As you are well aware, biology changed rapidly over the last few decades, and the pace of change seems to be accelerating in recent years. Sequencing and assembly of human genome, hailed as one of the greatest achievements of mankind, was done at a staggering cost of ~$3B and the project needed decade long collaboration of the brightest minds in the world. Today, only ten short years later, a small group of researchers with limited funds can think of assembling a comparable-sized genome.

This change has been brought forth by technological progress on two fronts. Firstly, new innovations in chemistry and semiconductor processing continue to drive down the costs of sequencing, arraying and other large-scale biochemical experiments. Secondly, an equally fast-paced set of innovations in the computational arena allows proper utilization of data derived from large-scale experiments. For example, it would not have been possible to quickly align billions of short reads to a reference genome, if algorithms incorporating Burrows Wheeler transform were not developed for bioinformatics. Similarly, using innovative graph-theoretic concepts, such as de Bruijn graphs, de novo assembly of genomes from short reads has become possible.

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