1. ¹Institute for Cancer Genetics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
2. ²Department of Pediatrics, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Correspondence: Dr K Basso, Institute for Cancer Genetics, Columbia University, 1130 St Nicholas Avenue, RM507, New York, NY 10032, USA. E-mail: kb451@columbia.edu

Received 20 October 2008; Revised 22 December 2008; Accepted 2 January 2009; Published online 5 February 2009.

Abstract

In recent years, we experienced an increasing development of new technologies that aim to comprehensively dissect the molecular genetics of cellular phenotypes. Pioneering studies have been performed on leukemia and lymphoma and then extended to many other types of malignancies. Genome-wide technologies allow taking snapshots of defined cellular context from an unbiased angle highlighting a complexity that we still struggle to fully interpret. The increasing availability of technologies to detect genetic, transcriptional and post-transcriptional characteristics of cellular systems needs to be associated with the development of computational tools to fully investigate these data in an integrated way. The evolution of different genome-wide technologies as well as data mining and integration tools will be discussed following studies performed on normal and malignant human mature B cells.