WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, SILKY M
Gene sequencing technology has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past couple of decades. But as genomicists and others involved in research projects that generate reams of DNA, RNA, or proteomic data know well, storing and analyzing all that information is rapidly becoming an intractable problem.
A recent article in The New York Times highlights the difficulty, citing many leading researchers airing their frustrations with discrepancies in the pace of innovation between sequencing and data handling technologies. "Data handling is now the bottleneck," David Haussler, director of the center for biomolecular science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the Times. "It costs more to analyze a genome than to sequence a genome."
Indeed, though the price of sequencing an entire ...
