How the little ones can do it well in NGS

NGS techniques have developed rapidly last year, with data production capacity increasing at a quite unexpected rate. With all these data to analyze, a new series of questions arise about how to organize a lab to actually manage and store sequencing projects and how to be effective in the analysis of the data themselves. Most of the comments appeared in the field pointed to the necessity of large computational facilities, proposing a frustrating scenario in which every small lab willing to work on NGS would need to implement a massive bioinformatic research group (it sounded like: who needs biologists anymore? Lets turn to computer science!) or see its possibilities severly limited to simple and rigid workflows. Now this commentary on Nature Biotechnology shows how even small research groups can be organized to do the best in NGS analysis without having to completly turn themselves into a computational center. The paper, based on the experience of the authors in their own center, suggests some interesting tricks on how to organize your activity and train your researchers so that they can be flexible and productive in the new field of high-throughput genomic. It really worths a read!