| FEATURES & INNOVATIONS |


BIG DATA DETECTIVES


A*STAR researchers are bringing big data genome analytics to Singapore


thousand. Every seven months, the rate of sequencing doubles, with projections that by 2025 the genome of every known and cata- logued species on Earth will have been spelled out, sometimes several times over. “Genome analytics is getting more and more


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powerful and is pervading all aspects of science and biomedicine, both on the research side and on the clinical side,” says Shyam Prabhakar, a group leader at the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). But, the resources needed to compute and store millions of gigabytes of data are enormous. Scaling up the analysis is


A*STAR RESEARCH


he cost of sequencing a human genome has plummeted over the past 15 years from one hundred million dollars to one


not as straightforward as just hooking up more computer processors and hiring more staff. “A common misconception is that big data


genomics just involves pouring money down a pit, turning a crank, and waiting for the answers to come out. It is a much more expert-driven exercise,” says Prabhakar. “When you go from ten samples to a hundred samples to a hundred thousand samples, suddenly, even the simplest problems become awfully complicated.” “In theory, more data means more informa-


tion and more knowledge. But in practice, we tend to get overwhelmed by the data and don’t know where to look,” says Niranjan Nagarajan, also at the GIS. “We have to invest in building systems that can cope with the data.”


Prabhakar and Nagarajan recently joined


together with colleagues from the GIS and other A*STAR institutes to launch a major initiative to establish infrastructure for big data genome analytics in Singapore. The Centre for Big Data and Integrative Genomics (c-BIG) is a joint collaboration between four institutes at A*STAR, including the GIS, the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2


R) and


the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), and was formally launched at a symposium on 10 November 2016. c-BIG includes projects designed to catalog


genetic variation in Singapore, predict a cancer patient’s response to drugs, prevent the


ISSUE 5 | OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2016


© Mischa Keijser/Cultura/Getty


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