of sequence in every run. These new technologies have allowed the price of sequencing a genome to drop by many orders of magnitude (an estimate for the human genome today is under $100,000) and have made possible research projects that involve sequencing extensive genomic regions across multiple individuals. Beyond this revolution in sequencing capacity, they have allowed new approaches to genomics and epigenomics, including RNA-seq analysis for gene expression (54) (see Figure 3), ChIP-seq analysis for DNA-protein interactions (50) and metagenomics applications for the study of biodiversity by sampling specific environmental niches (55). All of the above applications take advantage of the new technologies’ high throughput as well as the ability to generate sequence from DNA libraries without prior knowledge of the content.
