The world's largest human genome dataset will be opened for free

The National Institutes of Health announced that all data from the thousand Genome Project would be opened for free.

NetEase explores the March 31 report of the spectrum.ieee.org website, the National Institutes of Health announced 29th that all data on their thousand Genome Project will be opened for free. These data totals reach 200TB, the world's largest human genetic mutation dataset. Amazon's cloud computing company-Amazon Web Services-will store the vast database.

The thousand-person genome project aims to lay the groundwork for a study of how genetic variability affects health and the relationship between diseases. The free opening of all data means that more scientists can use the data for research to find out more about the relationship between genotype and diseases such as cancer and diabetes at a faster rate. The program, launched in 2008, is based on a genome of more than 2,600 people in 26 countries and regions around the world. The results of the DNA sequencing of 1700 of them will be published and stored in the cloud soon, and the remaining 900 will be sorted in 2012.

The National Institutes of Health's thousand-person genome project is part of a larger initiative to manage the vast amount of data produced by scientific research-data management itself is a science. Because datasets such as the thousand-person genome project are large, few researchers have the capacity to deal with them and therefore cannot be used. According to the National Institutes of Health, data from the thousand-person genome Project, if printed, can be filled with 16 million filing cabinets, and more than 30,000 DVDs are required if standard DVD storage is used.

For scientists and their research institutions, it is good news that the thousand-person genome project data is stored in cloud storage without having to have a greater bandwidth and data storage and analysis processing capabilities. "This means that all researchers and laboratories can get complete data on the thousand-person genome project, regardless of size or budget," said Depac Singh, chief product manager at Amazon Network Services. They can immediately analyze the data without having to devote resources to it. Typically, they need a lot of hardware, facilities, and people to get the data. Scientists can speed up the pace of research as the data needed for research is available without the need to devote resources. ”

For Amazon Web services, data stored in the thousand-person genome project may also be good news. The New York Times reported that processing such massive amounts of data required great computational power, and Amazon Web Services could request additional resources for further processing or analysis of the data.

The White House believes that cloud storage of the thousand-person genome Project data is a model of the solution presented by their "Big Data research and development initiative". The U.S. Office of Science and Technology policy announced 29th that more than $200 million would be invested in 6 federal agencies to promote research in large data computing-including large data analysis-and the use of large data in scientific exploration, environmental and biomedical research, education and national security. (Source: spectrum.ieee.org website, compiling: shooter)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)