D-N-A is probably the most universal three-letter acronym today, standing for deoxyribo nucleic acid, the so-called "stuff of life". This molecule constitutes the intimate and still puzzling core around which much of our life, spanning from behavior to health, revolves. It encodes indeed the basic set of sequence instructions (coined "genes") to build our cells; this material of inheritance is housed on chromosomes in our cells, and passed on from one generation to the next.
With a genome the sum of all an individual organism's genes, "genomics" coins the study of the genomes of organisms. Direct applications of genomics include the tracking of DNA sequence variations underlying susceptibility to common human diseases and, in the very recent years and months, the drafting of responses to confront nature's greatest threats: pandemics.
A major branch of genomics is concerned with the establishment of maps to help us navigate around the landscape of a genome ("genetic mapping") and the reading of genomes' sequences ("genome sequencing"). It was established as early as in the 1970-1980s by Fred Sanger, a double Nobel-Prize laureate. Advances in that discipline rely heavily on the development of IT ("information technology") applications to the particular fields of molecular biology and molecular medicine ("bioinformatics"), as well as on progresses in sequencing technologies.
