Genomics has undergone a transformation so rapid that even seasoned scientists remark on its velocity. Sequencing costs that seemed impossibly low a decade ago have fallen further still. Spatial and single-cell technologies now populate not just top-tier institutes but mid-size research hospitals. Physicians increasingly expect molecular information at the time of diagnosis, not months later. The scientific imagination has expanded accordingly: whole-genome sequencing for newborn screening, single-cell atlases for entire organs, and tumor profiling in real-time during therapy are now normal.

Yet, amid this acceleration, a curious bottleneck has emerged. Sequencing, once the rate-limiting step, is often the easiest part. The hard parts lie upstream and downstream of sequencing: preparing p

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