The age of -omics biology means that scientists examine changes at the level of the genome, not at the level of individual genes or proteins.
The genome is the set of all genes, regulatory sequences, and other information contained within the noncoding regions of an organism's DNA. Thus, genomics is genetics writ large, the culmination of rapidly accumulating information about vast numbers of genes and DNA sequences from scores of organisms.
The content of this topic room describes genomes in intricate and fascinating detail, paying special attention to the methods used to gather and analyze data on a scale never before seen in the biological sciences. Various articles describe different genomics-based methods for the study of genetic variation, including microarrays and array-based comparative genomic hybridization. Other articles examine the value of genomic data in areas as diverse as medicine, systematics, and conservation biology. Like all stories in science, the history of genomics is fraught with conflict, disagreement, and excitement; accordingly, this topic room also tries to relate some of the personalities and ideas that have shaped genomics, including the ongoing face-off between publicly funded and corporate genome sequencing concerns. Finally, this topic room serves as an "-omics" center of sorts, providing information on epigenomics (DNA modification), transcriptomics (cellular RNA content), and proteomics (the constellation of proteins characteristic of a given cell).
