Inthe modern era of genomics, data has become the new DNA. Every human genome carries approximately three billion base pairs, and when thousands of genomes are sequenced daily across the world, the resulting data volume is staggering. The field of bioinformatics now faces a defining challenge: how to manage, analyze, and extract meaning from terabytes of genetic information that continue to grow exponentially.
The phrase “Big Data, Small Genes” perfectly captures the paradox of our time. A single cell’s DNA, when fully decoded, produces massive datasets that require advanced computational power and storage infrastructure. This data explosion began with the Human Genome Project, which took over a decade and billions of dollars to sequence one genome. Today, high-throughput sequencing technologies can perform the same task in a few days for just a few hundred dollars. The progress is remarkable, but it has also introduced a data management problem unlike anything seen before in biology.
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