Biology: The big challenges of big data

As they grapple with increasingly large data sets, biologists and computer scientists uncork new bottlenecks. B iologists are joining the big-data club. With the advent of high-throughput genomics, life scientists are starting to grapple with massive data sets, encountering challenges with handling, processing and moving information that were once the domain of astronomers and high-energy physicists 1. With every passing year, they turn more often to big data to probe everything from the regulation of genes and the evolution of genomes to why coastal algae bloom, what microbes dwell where in human body cavities and how the genetic make-up of different cancers influences how cancer patients fare 2. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and one of the world's largest biology-data repositories, currently stores 20 petabytes (1 petabyte is 10 15 bytes) of data and backups about genes, proteins and small molecules. Genomic data account for 2 peta-bytes of that, a number that more than doubles every year 3 (see 'Data explosion'). This data pile is just one-tenth the size of the data store at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Every year, particle-collision events in CERN's Large Hadron Collider generate around 15 petabytes of data — the equivalent of about 4 million high-definition feature-length films. But the EBI and institutes like it face similar data-wrangling challenges to those at CERN, says Ewan Birney, associate director of the EBI. He and his colleagues now regularly meet with organizations such as CERN and the European Space Agency (ESA) in Paris to swap lessons about data storage, analysis and sharing. All labs need to manipulate data to yield research answers. As prices drop for high-throughput instruments such as automated Extremely powerful computers are needed to help biologists to handle big-data traffic jams.