<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>The enormous increase in data availability brought about by genomic projects is paralleled by an equally unprecedented increase in the expectations for new medical,
pharmacological, environmental and biotechnological discoveries. Whether or not we
will be able to meet (at least partially) these expectations will depend on how well
we will be able to interpret the data and translate the mono-dimensional information
encrypted in genomes into a detailed understanding of its biological meaning at the
phenotypic level. The process is far from being trivial, and the obstacles along the
road are formidable: even the problem of identifying coding regions in eukaryotic
genomes is not completely solved. Far more complex is identification of the function of
the encoded proteins, and this will probably represent the most challenging problem
for the next generations of scientists.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Jul; 4(4):402-405