Computational biology. Bioinformatics--trying to swim in a sea of data.

Advances in many areas of genomics research are heavily rooted in engineering technology, from the capillary electrophoresis units used in large-scale DNA sequencing projects, to the photolithography and robotics technology used in chip manufacture, to the confocal imaging systems used to read those chips, to the beam and detector technology driving high-throughput mass spectroscopy. Further advances in (for example) materials science and nanotechnology promise to improve the sensitivity and cost of these technologies greatly in the near future. Genomic research makes it possible to look at biological phenomena on a scale not previously possible: all genes in a genome, all transcripts in a cell, all metabolic processes in a tissue.