Sequencing a Human Genome In a Week 101
blackbearnh writes "The Human Genome Project took 13 years to sequence a single human's genetic information in full. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be talking about his work at OSCON, and gave O'Reilly Radar a sense of where the state of the art in genome sequencing is heading. 'Now we can run these instruments. We can generate a lot of data. We can align it to the human reference. We can detect the variance. We can determine which variance exists in one genome versus another genome. Those variances that are cancerous, specific to the cancer genome, we can annotate those and say these are in genes. ... Now the difficulty is following up on all of those and figuring out what they mean for the cancer. ... We know that they exist in the cancer genome, but which ones are drivers and which ones are passengers? ... [F]inding which ones are actually causative is becoming more and more the challenge now.'"
DNA GATC (Score:5, Funny)
Functions that don't do anything, no comments, worst piece of code ever!
I say we fork and refactor the entire project.
How about storing it in analog format? (Score:5, Funny)
Just store all that data as a chemical compound. Maybe a nucleic acid of some kind? Using two long polymers made of sugars and phosphates? I bet the whole thing could be squeezed into something smaller than the head of a pin!
We pissed away $3 billion dollars (Score:0, Funny)
Re:How about storing it in analog format? (Score:1, Funny)
I bet the whole thing could be squeezed into something smaller than the head of a pin!
That's what she said!
Re:DNA GATC (Score:3, Funny)