Google Genomics to Let Anyone Store, Manipulate Genomic Data

As DNA sequencing is continuing to drop in price, researchers are able to perform studies that were previously beyond reach, while clinical institutions are looking to begin screening patients’ DNAs to diagnose diseases at the earliest stages. The big limitation once you have someone’s DNA sequence is that it takes up about 100 gigabytes disk space just to store. Performing any kind of computational manipulation of such large volumes of data requires larger computer, so Google is naturally getting into this business by offering a place to work with DNA sequence data.

Google Genomics is a new platform where for $25 the company will store your whole genome sequence for a year. A million API calls to work on this data costs $1 and includes things like alignment slicing, variant lookups, and dataset management. The data can be made public and others can utilize the platform to do their own studies, the user of the data paying for the API calls that are used.

Here’s a video from Google Genomics presenting the service:

 

Link: Google Genomics…