Cancer genome sequencing: Understanding malignancy as a disease of the genome, its conformation, and its evolution

Advances in cancer genomics have been propelled by the steady evolution of molecular profiling technologies. Over the past decade, high-throughput sequencing technologies have matured to the point necessary to support disease-specific shotgun sequencing. This has compelled whole-genome sequencing studies across a broad panel of malignancies. The emergence of high-throughput sequencing technologies has inspired new chemical and computational techniques enabling interrogation of cancer-specific genomic and transcriptomic variants, previously unannotated genes, and chromatin structure. Finally, recent progress in single-cell sequencing holds great promise for studies interrogating the consequences of tumor evolution in cancers presenting with genomic heterogeneity. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.