This month, the scientific community celebrates the 25th anniversary of GenBank, the open access database of DNA sequences (and the molecules they encode) which is now part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. Heralded as one of the earliest bioinformatics community projects, it has contributed to our present wealth of genomic and molecular information and our growing need to understand how this information can be linked to physiology and disease. Since then, biocomputational, informatics, and statistical methods have been used to relate nucleotide sequences and molecules to sets of diseases, including asthma and breast cancer. But as highlighted in meetings such as last month’s Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, the same high-bandwidth measurement style that has accelerated the molecular and genetic study of disease must be practiced in physiology if we are to gain a deeper understanding states of normal and impaired health.
