Digital gene expression technologies
Most attention has been given so far to microarray data, but the next 5 years are likely to see a technological revolution in which sequencing technologies come to dominate expression analysis. Sequencing technologies produce discrete expression counts instead of expression intensities, in other words, digital instead of analogue data. The information-borrowing principles so fruitful in microarray analysis can be adapted to digital data, although the mathematics is different and more difficult. Accounting for specific features of the new technologies will require considerable bioinformatics effort, with benefits in proportion.