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Biotech / Medical : Biotech News -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (6729)	1/22/2010 11:49:52 AM
From: Jibacoa	Respond to of 7143

Cloud Computing coming to help in Biotech Research.<g> In the coming year, it is not unreasonable to expect that the amount of sequence data generated around the world will outstrip that generated in the past decade. The National Institutes of Health's Cancer Genome Atlas (CGA; cancergenome.nih.gov is already ramping up its effort to sequence hundreds of genomes in 20 different types of cancer. And almost everywhere one looks, other sequencing projects are springing up or gathering pace; examples include the 1000 Genomes Project (a high-resolution map of human genomic variation from 1,000 individuals; 1000genomes.org, the Personal Genome Project (the exomes of tens of healthy volunteers; personalgenomes.org, the 1001 Genomes Project (sequence variation in 1,001 strains of Arabidopsis thaliana;http://1001genomes.org/); and the Mouse Genomes Project (the genomes of 17 mouse strains; sanger.ac.uk. Those with any doubts as to whether we have entered the decade of the sequencer need only pay a visit to the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<g> Next-generation sequencing platforms are playing an increasingly prominent role in resequencing efforts. But their role in de novo sequencing and assembly is also broadening from simple microbes to filling gaps and providing finer sequence resolution and coverage in higher organisms—the characterization of the human pan-genome. Next-generation sequencers produce a prodigious stream of data. A single Illumina instrument, for example, can generate up to 90 billion bases per run. This represents terabytes of raw image data that require at a minimum 4 GB of RAM and 750 GB of local storage capacity to carry out the data handling and analysis. The first software (CrossBow) capable of performing alignment and single nucleotide polymorphism analysis on multiple whole-human data sets on a computing cloud was published just 6 weeks ago (Genome Biol. 10, R134, 2009). Essentially, the package makes it possible to analyze an entire human genome in a single day while sitting with a laptop at your local Starbucks.<g> nature.com Bernard