Over the last ten years the amount of biological sequence data available to
researchers has increased by several orders of magnitude, and complete genome
sequences (nearly nonexistent ten years ago) have become commonplace. The
techniques involved in analyzing these sequences have evolved almost as
rapidly, and several (e.g, BLAST) have become so commonly used in molecular
biology that their names have become verbs. Even so, a number of extremely
powerful tools and techniques developed for comparative genomic analysis
remain unfamiliar to molecular biologists, and thus are underutilized.