Medical sequencing for diseases with locus and allelic heterogeneities has been limited by the high cost and low throughput of traditional sequencing technologies. "Second-generation" sequencing (SGS) technologies allow the parallel processing of a large number of genes and , therefore , offer great promise for medical sequencing; however , their use in clinical laboratories is still in its infancy. Our laboratory offers clinical resequencing for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) using an array-based platform that interrogates 19 of more than 30 genes known to cause DCM. We explored both the feasibility and cost effectiveness of using PCR amplification followed by SGS technology for sequencing these 19 genes in a set of five samples enriched for known sequence alterations (109 unique substitutions and 27 insertions and deletions). While the analytical sensitivity for substitutions was comparable to that of the DCM array (98%) , SGS technology performed better than the DCM array for insertions and deletions (90.6% versus 58%). Overall , SGS performed substantially better than did the current array-based testing platform; however , the operational cost and projected turnaround time do not meet our current standards. Therefore , efficient capture methods and/or sample pooling strategies that shorten the turnaround time and decrease reagent and labor costs are needed before implementing this platform into routine clinical applications. (J Mol Diagn 2010, 12

Two measures of the degree of genome reorganization based on synteny data are presented. The first, q, measures how far the original syntenic relationships have decayed during the separation of two taxa. The second measure, Q, is a logarithmic transformation of q, so constructed that Q increases unlimitedly while q deflects when reorganization becomes substantial. Numerical examples are given for the genomic reorganizations that have occurred during the evolution of humans, mice and rats. The degree of genome reorganization between the mouse and the rat is estimated to be about 1/5 of the degree of reorganization between humans and the rodent species.

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