November’s
issueofGenome Medicinereflects the
excitement in the field about the potential for RNA to act as a biomarker for
disease and to help researchers unravel the underlying disease mechanism.

MicroRNAs, which
are short RNAs of around 22 nucleotides, are attracting a lot of interest for
detecting and predicting the outcome of a disease. In aResearch Highlight,
Florian Kuchenbauer and colleagues reflect on the recent finding that microRNAs
are expressed at different levels in blood in different diseases, which could
lead to blood-based diagnosis of disease. This issue also features aResearch
Articleby Rotem Ben-Hamo and Sol Efroni, which indicates a role for
microRNAhsa-miR-9, along with the p38 network,in predicting the prognosis ofpatients with the brain cancer
glioblastoma multiforme (seeblogto find out more).

The otherResearch
Highlightthis month examines a new assay, termed CaptureSeq, that enriches
low-level RNA transcripts forhigh-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq).

Recently,Genome
Medicinehas highlighted the increasing clinical impact of pharmacogenomic
research, and in aReview Articleby Jose Florez and Chunmei Huang the
authors look at insights emergingfrom
the pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic studies of type 2 diabetes.

Stuart Orkin, Guest Editorof our Focus on Stem Cells,and Jonghwan Kim have provided aReviewon embryonic stem cell-specific
signatures in cancer.

Meeting
reports in the journal are proving to be popular, and this month is no
exception. Have a look at theReportof the Wellcome Trust meeting on Epigenomics of common disease and the Cold Spring Harbor LaboratoryReporton Personal Genomes.

If you
missed last month’s issue, you can look at ithere。兰德齐夫和
colleagues’Research Articleattracted a lot of interest, as the first report
that doctors do change prescriptions for patients with breast cancer when they
receive genotyping information. David Gurwitz and Jeantine Lunshof discuss this
study and the implications for personalized medicine in an associatedResearch
Highlight。

Other highly
accessed articles from last month include Alan Wright’sReporton the
Wellcome Trust conference on the Genomics of Common Diseases, Huck-Hui Ng’s
reviewarticle ontranscriptomic
analysis of stem cells, and Wyeth Wasserman’sReviewof themethods
and software for predicting functional variation within thecis-regulatory sequences.