Advances in sequencing technologies allow us to generate billions of base pairs worth of nucleotide sequence data in short periods of time. Firstly applied to genome sequencing, different approaches have been developed to analyze other aspects of the cell such as the transcriptome, the exome or the epigenome. While most talks focus on the results of these studies, we will review the technology behind next-generation sequencing (NGS) as well as some of the tools used in these analysis. Lastly, a more in depth look at transcriptome analysis and its application in cancer studies will be given.

A good review paper of pair-end tags in next-generation sequencing and its applications:
Fullwood et al, Genome Research, 2009. Next-generation DNA sequencing of paired-end tags (PET) for transcriptome and genome analyses.

A recent example published in Nature Genetics regarding cancer discoveries done using NGS of transriptomes and genomes: Morin et al, 2010, Nat. Genetics. Somatic mutations altering EZH2 (Tyr641) in follicular and diffuse large B-cell lymphomas of germinal-center origin.