KOBIC (Korean Bioinformation Center), KRIBB, Daejeon, Korea. Dept. of Bioinformatics, Soongsil Univ., Seoul, Korea.</span></div>

There are at least five complete genome sequences available&nbsp;in 2008. It is known that there are over 15,000,000 genetic variants called SNPs in&nbsp;the dbSNP&nbsp;database. The cost of a full genome sequencing in 2009&nbsp;will be&nbsp;claimed to be less than $5000 USD.&nbsp;The genomics era has arrived in 2008. This review introduces&nbsp;technologies, bioinformatics,&nbsp;genomics visions, and variomics projects. Variomics is&nbsp;the&nbsp;study of the total genetic variation in an individual and&nbsp;populations.&nbsp;Research on&nbsp;genetic variation is the most&nbsp;valuable among many genomics research branches.&nbsp;Genomics and variomics projects will change biology and the society so dramatically that biology will become an everyday technology as personal computers and the internet. Biorevolution 'BioRevolution' is the term that can adequately describe this change.<br />

Since the launch of the human genome project Human Genome Project (HGP)&nbsp;in 1990 by NIH of USA, researchers have been developing faster DNA sequencers </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Shendure, Mitra et al. 2004; Chan 2005; Metzker 2005; Gupta 2008; Mardis 2008)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">. HGP was said to be led by James Watson who modeled DNA in Cambridge, UK in 1953. In 2003, the international human genome sequencing consortium International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium held a press conference to announce the completion of the human genome </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(IHGSC 2004)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">. In 2008, after 55 years, his complete genome sequence was publicized by using 454 DNA sequencers developed by a company </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Wheeler, Srinivasan et al. 2008)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">.&nbsp;In 2007, Craig Venter of former Celera founder published his own personal genome in PLoS Biology </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Levy, Sutton et al. 2007)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">.&nbsp;We are entering the personalized biology era with the advent of next generation sequencing technologies.<br />

The first breakthrough in genome sequencing came from Watson's&nbsp;colleague in Cambridge, Fred Sanger. In 1977, Sanger and his team produced the first useful DNA sequencing method and publicized the first complete genome </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Sanger, Air et al. 1977)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">. It was a tiny virus genome known as phi X 174. Soon after phi X 174, he published the first complete organelle genome which was mitochondrion </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Anderson, Bankier et al. 1981)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">. By 1998, researchers in the US evaluated multiplex genome sequencing technologies and were aware that one person's whole genome could be sequenced in one day using contemporary technologies. George Church was the Ph.D. student of Walter Gilbert who received a Nobel Prize with Sanger for developing a sequencing method. Gilbert's method was not used much. However, his colleague Church kept developing sequencing methods. One of them is based on Polony idea </span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">(Porreca, Shendure et al. 2006)</span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt">. This technology is used by KNOME Inc. that is a full genome sequencing company. Genome sequencing technology&nbsp;is moving forward to the level where as computer CPUs are universally used. DNA sequencing is one of the most important industrial technologies in biology due to its perpetual use and new applications in the future.&nbsp;<br />

<div style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; TEXT-INDENT: -36pt"><font size="2">IHGSC (2004). &quot;Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome.&quot; <u>Nature</u> <strong>431</strong>(7011): 931-45.</font></div>