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Thursday 19 January 2012

60 genomes in the clouds....


The diffusion of NGS technology has made clear that no one has the ability to analyze in depth all the data produced in large scale WGS or WES projects.
It is thus not surprising that many NGS studies, either carried out by a large consortium or by a single research center or private company, are applying an open-source model: we provide the data, you do your analysis, we all share the honours.
This means that today a huge amount of genomic data (complete exomes and genomes) can be accessed and analyzed for free, thus creating the opportunity of performing genomic research with no more than a PC (...well, maybe not your old laptop...).

In this scenario, here is an interesting initiative from Complete Genomics, a life sciences company that has developed and commercialized an innovative DNA sequencing platform: a few months ago they have released on BioNimbus Cloud a dataset of 60 complete human genomes at high coverage (average 55x). You can read the Complete Genomics annoncement here and access the data here. This dataset is intriguing for several reasons:
- these are complete genomes from different population;
- all have high coverage;
- they include some trios;
- data can be accessed through the BioNimbus cloud computing service.

This last aspect means that one can subscribe to BioNimbus Cloud and use their virtual machine hosted by Amazon Elastic Cloud to do the NGS data analysis. Not only you no longer have to produce the sequences, you don't even need the computational power to perform the bioinformatics analysis! We are living in a new genomic era, in a rapidly evolving world where, to do research, you will only need some bioinformatic skills and an open mind to come up with a good scientific question. The rest is provided by the NGS community!

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