A decade and genome of change

Ten years ago, Bill Clinton, the then US president, announced at an historic event at the White House that the international Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics corporation had completed the initial draft of the human genome. President Clinton pledged the US's commitment to continue to translate this genomic advance into healthcare and therapeutic strategies, as well as protecting private genetic information. Little did he know of the impending cuts in exactly this area during the Bush years - ah, but let's not go there. The genomics field since then has progressed at a phenomenal rate, with advances in the field being nothing short of monumental.At around the same time as this historic announcement, Genome Biology [1] was launched. This new journal was quite unlike other journals in that it was open access and published online. In an accompanying column to this editorial, Greg Petsko [2], Genome Biology's long-term and beloved-of-many columnist, discusses Genome Biology's launch, in addition to charting our success and the unique approach that has seen Genome Biology, in a relatively short period of time, take its place as a premier journal for genomics research. To mark some of the developments in the genomics field in the past decade, and to celebrate Genome Biology's tenth birthday, we have commissioned a series of reviews focusing on key areas from the last ten years, ranging from the human microbiome to the cancer genome projects. The themes of these reviews will also be discussed at Genome Biology's inaugural conference, which is being hosted jointly with our sister journal, Genome Medicine [3], in Boston in October [4].Technological developments over the past decade have been the catalyst of innovation and progress, driving the genomics field forward at a dizzying pace. Along with these technological advances have come some revisions of the very gene count estimates that were announced ten years ago. Strikingly, current estimates are nowhere near the or