While everyone in the in the world of sequencing has heard this cynical joke, as an industry, the joke is about to be on us. We have focused our time, energy and investment on the ability to sequence the genome in a day, and have largely ignored the computational power required to extract and analyze the genomic data in a timeframe that keeps it relevant. This disparity creates significant risk of delay to the pace of research and creates a scenario where the joke becomes “the genome in a day but with the year-long analysis.”
The vast majority of academic and core laboratories are not prepared for the massive wave of data that will be coming off of multiple new “Genome-in-a-Day” technology offerings. Most labs are already computationally resource constrained, struggling to just store volumes of data. The average analysis pipeline of basic alignment, consensus calling, variant detection and filtering process takes 14 days, even with a large cluster for most sequencing centers. For most, the exorbitant cost of building more computing infrastructure is not a realistic short term solution and ultimately will not shorten computation time.
To read the full, original article click on this link: First Comes The $1,000 genome, Then Comes The $10,000 Analysis | Xconomy
