I guess if you're an evolutionary biologist the thing is that there will always be more to discover from a genomics perspective (so it's a bit of a search for s

I guess if you're an evolutionary biologist the thing is that there will always be more to discover from a genomics perspective (so it's a bit of a search for smaller and smaller), but if you step back and do quantitative analysis of the structure of the tree of life I think it will be the case that what we discover in the next 100 years is not going to be as dramatic as what we have learned in the last 100. Big shifts (like archae; my grad school boss discovered that methanogens are archae) came before genomics even! And while they are still some surprises, they are increasingly on the edges. For many things you probably need to only do a blast search. for example, I identified candidate mutations in an enzyme one combination of which dramatically improved the output by carefully doing a blast search. Likewise, my postdoc boss basically figured out an entire small molecule biosynthetic pathway with ~ a day's worth of blast searching. To understand transcriptional networks, you can get really far with qpcr, or if you want to get really old school yeast-two-hybrid, both of these impossible without genomics. We have total organism knockout Libraries in yeast and e coli that are powerful tools, and have a genome that we've minimized to sub-500 genes. Yes there's 100 or so that we don't understand (mostly short transmembrane proteins that honestly probably need to be there in bulk just to maintain tonicity). These are just the projects I've directly worked on or been a fly-on-the-wall on. Anyways, point is most of the really bid things that the genomics revolutionized have been ticked off. There's still a lot to do, obviously, but I think we know more than you're giving credit for. It does nobody a service to treat biology as a mysterious black box that will never be penetrated.