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Cover Depiction of a new type of highly miniaturized microarray that incorporates randomness in its design. Each array contains ~50,000 beads carrying oligonucleotide probes. The beads are lodged in 3-5m-diameter wells on the surface of a hexagonally packed optical fiber bundle. The location and identity of the randomly arrayed beads are determined using a hybridization-based decoding process. From left to right, the cropped images show a progression from raw fluorescent hybridization images, through partially processed data to the fully decoded array on the right, in which individual beads are identified by 1,624 false color codes. Larger and smaller format arrays can also be made. Among other applications, the decoded arrays have been used to develop a microarraybased gene expression profiling assay that makes use of PCR, and to carry out genotyping from small amounts of human genomic DNA using whole-genome amplification. (Artwork provided by Andrew Roberts at Studio 209, Portland, OR. [For details, see Gunderson et al., pp.870–877.])

ENSEMBL Special Cover A diagram displaying the position of SNPs in the BRCA1 gene and their potential changes as an example of integrated genome data presented on the Ensembl Web site. The vertical, peach-colored lines indicate exons in genomic, transcript, and exon contexts. Other vertical lines denote the position of the SNPs in genomic, gene, and exon contexts. SNPs that have a corresponding amino acid change are displayed in orange boxes, whereas green boxes mark synonymous SNPs. Gray boxes designate SNPs that do not change transcript structure. Purple boxes indicate Pfam domains. (For details, see Stalker et al., pp. 951–955)