Life Science Dictionary22 terms

Genomics Terms

Genomics studies whole genomes, all of an organism's DNA at once, rather than one gene at a time. These terms cover sequencing methods, genetic variation such as SNPs, genome-wide association studies, and the tools used to analyze the data.

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BioinformaticsBioinformaticsBioinformatics is the science of using computers to gather, store, analyze and share biological data, especially DNA, RNA and protein sequences.
BLASTBioinformaticsBLAST is a widely used program that searches databases for DNA or protein sequences similar to a query and ranks the matches by statistical significance.

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Copy number variationGenomicsCopy number variation is a difference between people in how many copies of a given stretch of DNA their genomes carry, due to deletions or duplications.

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FASTA formatBioinformaticsFASTA format is a plain-text format for DNA, RNA or protein sequences in which each record starts with a header line beginning with > followed by the sequence.

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Next-generation sequencingGenomicsNext-generation sequencing (NGS) is a set of high-throughput methods that read the sequences of millions of short DNA fragments in parallel.

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RNA sequencingGenomicsRNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is a method that uses high-throughput sequencing to identify and count the RNA molecules in a sample.

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TranscriptomeGenomicsThe transcriptome is the full set of RNA molecules made in a cell, tissue or organism at a given time, showing which genes are active.

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Whole-genome sequencingGenomicsWhole-genome sequencing is a laboratory method that reads nearly all of an organism's DNA, its genes and the noncoding DNA between them, in one test.

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