Genomics

Broadly interpreted genomics is the study of all high-throughput DNA-related research, from actual genomics at the DNA level to transcriptomics at the RNA level or epigenomics at the level of DNA modifications. All these can be relatively easily studied through next-generation sequencing. Next-generation sequencing, however, is usually applied to study the whole set of thousands of genes, or a relatively large subset of a few hundreds of genes. Sometimes, only few genes are of interest. In such case, quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) for DNA quantification or reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) for RNA quantification might be more appropriate.