A DNA search engine

ETH Zurich – Computer scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a digital tool capable of searching through millions of published DNA records in a matter of seconds. This can significantly accelerate research into antibiotic resistance and unknown pathogens: “Rare hereditary diseases can be identified in patients and specific mutations in tumour cells detected – DNA sequencing revolutionised biomedical research decades ago. In recent years, new sequencing methods (next-generation sequencing) in particular have resulted in numerous scientific breakthroughs. In 2020/2021, for example, they enabled the rapid decoding and global monitoring of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Meanwhile, more and more researchers are making the results of sequenced DNA publicly available. This has given rise to the creation of huge data volumes, which are stored in central databases such as the American SRA (Sequence Read Archive) or the European ENA (European Nucleotide Archive). Around 100 petabytes of data are stored there – roughly the same amount as all the text on the internet, one petabyte being the equivalent of one million gigabytes. To date, biomedical scientists have needed massive computing power and other resources to search through this amount of DNA sequences and compare them with their own sequences – making the efficient searching in such mountains of data a sheer impossibility. Computer scientists at ETH Zurich have now solved this problem…”

Posted in: Health Care, Medicine, Search Engines