November’s
issueof Genome Medicine reflects the
excitement in the field about the potential for RNA to act as a biomarker for
disease and to help researchers unravel the underlying disease mechanism.

MicroRNAs, which
are short RNAs of around 22 nucleotides, are attracting a lot of interest for
detecting and predicting the outcome of a disease. In a Research Highlight,
Florian Kuchenbauer and colleagues reflect on the recent finding that microRNAs
are expressed at different levels in blood in different diseases, which could
lead to blood-based diagnosis of disease. This issue also features a Research
Article by Rotem Ben-Hamo and Sol Efroni, which indicates a role for
microRNA hsa-miR-9, along with the p38 network,  in predicting the prognosis of patients with the brain cancer
glioblastoma multiforme (see blog to find out more).

The other Research
Highlight this month examines a new assay, termed CaptureSeq, that enriches
low-level RNA transcripts for high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq).

Recently, Genome
Medicine has highlighted the increasing clinical impact of pharmacogenomic
research, and in a Review Article by Jose Florez and Chunmei Huang the
authors look at insights emerging  from
the pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic studies of type 2 diabetes.

Stuart Orkin, Guest Editorof our Focus on Stem Cells,and Jonghwan Kim have provided a Review on embryonic stem cell-specific
signatures in cancer.

Meeting
reports in the journal are proving to be popular, and this month is no
exception. Have a look at the Report of the Wellcome Trust meeting on Epigenomics of common disease and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Report on Personal Genomes.

If you
missed last month’s issue, you can look at it here. Elad Ziv and
colleagues’ Research Article attracted a lot of interest, as the first report
that doctors do change prescriptions for patients with breast cancer when they
receive genotyping information. David Gurwitz and Jeantine Lunshof discuss this
study and the implications for personalized medicine in an associated Research
Highlight.

Other highly
accessed articles from last month include Alan Wright’s Report on the
Wellcome Trust conference on the Genomics of Common Diseases, Huck-Hui Ng’s
review  article on transcriptomic
analysis of stem cells, and Wyeth Wasserman’s Review of the methods
and software for predicting functional variation within the cis-regulatory sequences.