Tag Archives: Hadoop



Moving sequencing into the clinic takes more than just big data

Recent news articles discuss how NextBio scales technology to handle  genomics data

As genomic data makes its way from specialized laboratories into routine healthcare evaluations, it is perhaps appropriate that announcements of the latest sequencers were made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas rather than the  upcoming Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference.

New machines from Illumina and Life Technologies only strengthen the idea that 2012 is, in fact, the year of the $1000 genome. Led by a trickle of individual success stories, genome sequencing appears to be on the verge of altering the clinical landscape. While the FDA and regulatory bodies resolve the consumer issues of reimbursement and regulation crucial to patients, here at NextBio we tackle an intermediate problem: Making sense of the data. Read more…

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Q & A with Dan Grammas

“The interesting thing with biological data is that using new [software] technologies makes such a difference to what you can do with the data.”

Programming at NextBio could mean using software tools named after toy elephants or occasionally bribing the Curation team with chocolate. But working behind the scenes is still serious business. As Dan Grammas, Senior Software Engineer says, “I’m not just working to protect someone’s computer from a virus. The work we do here is relevant to people’s lives- researchers, clinicians, patients.”

Curation scientists keep track of all the data that’s published and import it to the NextBio pipeline. Software engineers process curated data, sorting and validating it so results can be accurately scored and categorized. Dan’s been programming for several decades now, and now develops APIs and pipelines to validate data imported into NextBio. Here’s what he has to say about where data goes when it ‘vanishes’ behind a progress bar that says “Processing”.
Read more…

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