Today the New York Times published an article entitled, "DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data" It describes the explosion of data being generated by DNA and RNA sequencing because the cost of sequencing has fallen dramatically.
When the Human Genome Project sequenced the first human genome in the late 90's, completing in 2001, it cost billions of dollars. But it launched a technological revolution that is driving the costs down rapidly. The current goal is "the $1000 genome" and that will probably be achieved within a year. The current cost is about $3000.
The article starts with BGI in China, an organization with a significant portion of the world's current sequencing capacity. Coincidentally, I will be visiting Sifei He (quoted) in China the week of December 12. My employer is BGI's largest customer, and my team's job for the past year has been figuring out how to get that data from China to our data centers, organize it, "index" it so it can be searched, and support retention policies governing when to get rid of it (it's expensive as hell to store hundreds of terabytes of data - you can't just put it on hard drives you buy at Best Buy).
If you wonder what I do for a living, this article does a pretty good job of describing it. The best part of my job is witnessing the bleeding edge of (biological) science.
By the way, the caption on the photo in the Times article is incorrect. The professor is not looking at "cells", he is looking at a "flow cell". The flow cell has eight tiny channels running through it that you can think of as test tubes. To perform a sequencing run an operator loads them with DNA or RNA that has been extracted from biological cells.
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