>With all of the new whole-genomes available, we can start to ask even tougher questions. And with more data available from more people, we can start to get som

>With all of the new whole-genomes available, we can start to ask even tougher questions. And with more data available from more people, we can start to get some real confidence behind our predictions. What I'd like to add to this is that we can spend more time and less money on "hobby" projects! These are the projects you don't really have explicit funding for, but you do anyway, using leftover money from various pots [1]. We have two PhD students who work on "hobby" projects. These projects include "outlandish" questions or "basic" research the funding committees didn't see the reason to fund. In our case, these two PhD students work with less studied plant organisms no-one else really looked into so far, but which have some interesting attributes. Some of these hobbies have been fruitful (interesting novel salinity resistance proteins found), some of these less (but it's always good to populate public databases from data of less well-known organisms). Cheaper genomics allow us to do so much more of these projects, exciting times! [1] See http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1431 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1431 (Of course, now the cost bottlenecks move somewhere else - it has become cheap to sequence an entire plant population, but it's still expensive to grow & especially phenotype that population - if you're into computer vision and are looking for a new project, automatic plant phenotyping is a field that still has a lot of work to do!)