**8. Impact and applications of NGS: Opening the doors into the world of "omics"**

All hereditary information is contained within the structure, organization, and function of an organism's genome. The continual emergence of many new public bioinformatics databases (Table 3) on the World Wide Web demonstrates and reflects the impact of NGS on the life sciences and our need to constantly develop new methods to interrogate and decode hereditary information in and around DNA (or RNA for some viruses) and its nucleotide sequences (http://www.bioinformaticsweb.net).

Although genomics is a relatively young field, arguably starting sometime between 1976 with the publication of the bacteriophage MS2 RNA genome [111] and 1986 when the word "ge‐ nomics" was first used [112], it already has made an enormous impact on the life sciences. The term "genomics" coined by Thomas Roderick in 1986 encompassed the structure and function of genes, and comparative genomics elucidated the hereditary relationships and evolution within and between different species [112]. Since the advent of NGS, the meaning of "genom‐ ics" has been narrowed more towards mapping the structure and organization of genomes and differentiating between *de novo* sequences, resequenced genomes, exonic or targeted sequences, and metagenomic sequences. The other implied meanings of "genomics" are attributed now to the suffix "-omics," added to integrated fields undertaken on a large or genome-wide scale such as transcriptomics, haplomics, methylomics, epigenomics, proteo‐ mics, metabolomics, nutrigenomics, physiomics, evolomics, epidemiomics, systeomics, personomics, multinomics, etc. [113]. Thus, NGS broadens our understanding of structural and functional genomics through the concepts of "omics" to provide new insight into the workings and meaning of genetic conservation and diversity of living things (http:// www.nature.com/omics/index.html). It is more than ever about how different organisms use genetics and molecular biology to survive and reproduce with and without mutations, disease, and diversity within their own life cycles and within their population networks and changing environmental conditions.
