In its August Editorial, Nature Genetics (40, 929; 2008) looks forward to the second Genomics of Common Diseases conference, to be held from 6 to 9 September 2008, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In a review of last year’s meeting, Enrico Petretto and colleagues (Nat. Genet. 39, 1299–1301; 2007) emphasized that recent successes in complex disease genetics rest upon rapid technological advances and the excellent communication and collaboration forged in the genome sequencing community and the SNP Consortium. They also stressed the importance of studying gene networks rather than single genes in the pathogenesis of disease. Finally, they noted that an evolutionary as well as a physiological perspective is required to understand the startlingly diverse genetic architectures of common diseases.

The Editorial asks what can be expected from this year’s meeting? “Over the past year, many new sequencing tools have been added for strategically resequencing candidate genes for rare and common variants alike. Bioinformatic tools have been launched for sequence assembly and comparison. Statisticians have developed methods for marker imputation and for rigorous association studies with structural variants.” Various other topics will be discussed at the conference as outlined in the Editorial, whch concludes: “In the era of personal genomics, with next-generation sequencing of thousands of human genomes just beginning, the focus of common disease genetics is already shifting from identification of loci and risks. We anticipate an intensification of functional genomics, investigation of the consequences of variation on gene expression and the effect of variation on the functioning of pathways and systems.”