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A single genome, true. But what if you wanted to compare 100,000 genomes of people with heart disease to find common genes for heart disease? Now you are at ~72
by rpedela 14y ago
A single genome, true. But what if you wanted to compare 100,000 genomes of people with heart disease to find common genes for heart disease? Now you are at ~72 TB which I would consider big data. As far as I am aware, enough human genomes have not been sequenced to do that. But it is coming (I hope).
- twic 14y agoWell, you probably wouldn't do it that way, for starters. There is a mature toolkit of techniques for narrowing down the interesting bits of the genome, so you have less sequence to look at. But yes, the day will come when it's feasible to simply sequence and compare large numbers of genomes. But by the time sequencing technology has got that much better, so will computers have!
- comrade_ogilvy 14y agoIf you were doing blind correlations between all the raw data at once, it would be 72 TB. There are ~30k genes (encoded protein sequences). 100,000 human individuals may or may not have that many deltas per gene. The data is naturally structured. There is no reason to believe that looking at 72TB at once is useful. You would start by looking for correlations with particular genes. (Even correlations with random genes is merely 30,000 simple problems.) This kind of work can be done on a single multicore computer with a lot diskspace and memory, if you have the right tools.