In 2001, the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics announced that after 10 years of work at a cost of some $400 million, they had completed a draft sequence of the human genome. Today, sequencing a human genome is something that a single researcher can do in a couple of weeks for less than $10,000.
Since 2002, the rate at which genomes can be sequenced has been doubling every four months or so, whereas computing power doubles only every 18 months. Without the advent of new analytic tools, biologists’ ability to generate genomic data will soon outstrip their ability to do anything useful with it.
In the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology, MIT and Harvard University researchers describe a new algorithm that drastically reduces the time it takes to find a particular gene sequence in a database of genomes. Moreover, the more genomes it’s searching, the greater the speedup it affords, so its advantages will only compound as more data is generated. In some sense, this is a data-compression algorithm — like the one that allows computer users to compress data files into smaller zip files. If you compress the data in the right way, then you can do your analysis directly on the compressed data. And that increases the speed while maintaining the accuracy of the analyses.
