The NY Times has a story up about the massive increase in DNA sequencing output over the past several years. In short, the rise in rapid-sequencing platforms and the declining cost of entry into the field has spurred an incredible increase in the pace of sequencing work.
The cost of sequencing a human genome — all three billion bases of DNA in a set of human chromosomes — plunged to $10,500 last July from $8.9 million in July 2007, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.
That is a decline by a factor of more than 800 over four years. By contrast, computing costs would have dropped by perhaps a factor of four in that time span.
John Hawks picks up on the story and wonders about the kind of private-public partnerships that might emerge to facilitate the handling and storage of such data in the future. I am intrigued by another aspect of it.
But the data challenges are also creating opportunities. There is demand for people trained in bioinformatics, the convergence of biology and computing. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to offer software and services to help analyze the data…
“We believe the field of bioinformatics for genetic analysis will be one of the biggest areas of disruptive innovation in life science tools over the next few years,” Isaac Ro, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a recent report.
The article places an emphasis on the lack of people and resources to provide primary analysis for these data. Certainly they are correct on this point. But I think the part that is left out is the need for people who can actually provide context above the level of the genome to these data. Bioinformatics and genomics can provide tremendous insight into the structure and properties of the genetic material itself, but they have little ability to look at the individual, population or environment those genetic data come from in anything more than a superficial manner. I can’t help but feel those more nuanced details about not just a genome, but an individual or population, will emerge as an increasingly important part of the process. This is an issue I have mentioned before, trying to distinguish between genetic information (primary sequence data) and genetic knowledge (what does the sequence data tell us about potential phenotypic pathways). Sounds like a job for anthropologists…
