Seven technologies to watch in 2022

From gene editing to protein-structure determination to quantum computing, here are seven technologies that are likely to have an impact on science in the year ahead. Roughly one-tenth of the human genome remained uncharted when genomics researchers Karen Miga at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Adam Phillippy at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, launched the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium in 2019. Now, that number has dropped to zero. In a preprint published in May last year, the consortium reported the first end-to-end sequence of the human genome, adding nearly 200 million new base pairs to the widely used human consensus genome sequence known as GRCh38, and writing the final chapter of the Human Genome Project1. First released in 2013, GRCh38 has been a valuable tool -- a scaffold on which to map sequencing reads. This is largely because the widely used sequencing technology developed by Illumina, in San Diego, California, produces reads that are accurate, but short.