From genome sequencing to bedside. Findings from the section on bioinformatics and translational informatics

To summarize excellent current research in the field of Bioinformatics and Translational Informatics with application in the health domain and evidence-based medicine.

We provide a synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2013, from which we attempt to derive a synthetic overview of current and future activities in the field. Three steps of selection were performed by querying PubMed and Web of Science. A first set of 5,549 articles was refined into a second set of 1,272 articles from which 15 articles were retained for peer-review.

The selection and evaluation process of this Yearbook's section on Bioinformatics and Translational Informatics yielded four excellent articles regarding the Human Genome and Medicine. Exploiting genomic data depends on having the appropriate reference annotation available. In the first article, the goal of the GENCODE Consortium is to produce and publish The GENCODE human reference gene set. As a result it is composed by merged manual and automatic annotations, which are frequently updated from public experimental databases. The quality of genome sequencing is platform-dependant. In the second article, a generic database independent from the sequencing technologies, Huvariome, can help to identify errors and inconsistencies in sequencing. To understand complex diseases of patients it will be of great importance to detect rare gene variants. This is the aim of the third study. Finally, in the last article, the plasma's DNA of healthy individual and patients suffering from cancer is compared.

The current research activities attest to the continuous convergence of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics for clinical practice. For instance, a direct use of high throughput sequencing technologies for patients could aid the diagnosis of complex diseases (such as cancer) without invasive surgery (such as biopsy) but only with blood analysis. However, ongoing genomic tests will generate massive amounts of data and will imply new trends in the near future: "Big Data" and smart health management.