Diagnostic Exome Sequencing — Are We There Yet?

Advances in technology are rapidly changing the field of medical genetics in both the research laboratory and the clinic. With the use of next-generation, or massively parallel, DNA sequencing, it is possible to determine the sequence of essentially all genes in an individual's genome — referred to as the exome — within a matter of days.This technology became widely available in 2005, and the first proof-of-principle experiment showing the power of exome sequencing for the discovery of genes associated with disease was published a few years later.1 Since then, exome analysis has been used in the research setting to . . .