These chips will enable rapid identification of the genes responsible for genetic diseases, rapid diagnosis of infectious agents or cancer, surveillance for emerging pathogens and a host of other applications. Another genomics-driven idea is to proactively eliminate potential human side effects in drugs by screening to eliminate interaction with all of the gene products of human except the targeted molecule itself. A third genomics-driven goal is to make computer predictions of protein structure, to obtain testable clues about possible functions for newly discovered genes. A related goal is to parallelize and speed up the methods of X-ray crystallography, making it possible to determine by analysis, the structure of all the gene products of an organism. At current rates of world effort, it will take 60 years to determine the structures of all the proteins of a bacterium.
Humans have twenty times that number of proteins.
Comparative genomics Relationships between genomes are indicative of the history of life on earth and can often provide clues relating to the major and minor events of speciation. On another level, genomic comparisons provide information on function, on how different organisms solve the same biological problems, how they adapt to, or take advantage of, their environment. Genomics has already begun to address the unanticipated traffic of genes between species, overturning the paradigm of the static genome. The practical consequences include ascertainment of the differences between pathogens and their benign cousins, the evolution of disease and of disease-resistance as well as resistance to antibiotics. The field of evolutionary biology is in some sense just beginning, now that genomics has extended the scope of studies from a few genes to whole genomes.