For a long time, microbial genomes were considered to be relatively stable just being altered by a few nucleotides per year. With an increasing amount of completely assembled microbial genomes it turns out that this assumption only holds true for a few bacterial lineages. In fact, most bacteria display highly dynamic genomes in terms of extrachromosomal elements as phages, plasmids and translocatable units. Also, on chromosome level structural variations can be observed in form of prophages, transposons, chromosomal translocations as well as large scale inversions and deletions. The role of adapting their genomes in terms of genome structure as a response to environmental stresses is still poorly understood for prokaryotes.

Cancer is a widespread cause of death and hence much research efforts concentrate on improving prognosis and therapy of diverse cancer types. Shedding light on the landscape of molecular dysregulation leading to cancer cell growth and progression will help to characterize preclinical cellular models of cancers. With continuing technical improvements and decreasing costs of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies at hand as well as immortalized tumor cell lines as model systems for cancer research the eukaryotic bioinformatics develops bioinformatic pipelines for molecular characterization for tumorigenesis, discovery of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes or biomarkers.