I regularly write about the microbiome – the trillions of bacteria that share our bodies with us, and the genes that they carry. At the recent International Human Microbiome Congress in Paris, I was immediately struck by two things. First, the field is clearly growing. It’s full of scientists who are doing great work to understand our bacterial associates, and who are glad that the microbes are finally hitting the big time.
BGI, the world’s largest genomics institute, has slashed the time to analyze batches of DNA sequencing data from nearly four days to just six hours using a NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based server farm.
The speed up is considered a critically important step in determining the chemical building blocks that make up a DNA molecule in an affordable manner. This is key for the genomics industry to achieve its target of the $1,000 genome — the point at which genomics can be used in clinical diagnostic tests as a practical component of patient care.
