DNA keeps all of our secrets, but analyzing the human genome is very difficult and expensive, both financially and in time. Now that can change.
It is true that we can find out everything about a person by looking at their DNA, but first of all you have to know what to look for, and second, you have to have a lot of time. Although tests can help find inherited diseases, sequencing someone’s genome can take days or even weeks. Precious time now drastically reduced.
A team of researchers and developers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio claim to have developed new software that is capable of analyzing a person’s DNA in 90 minutes. In this way doctors could diagnose hereditary diseases in a short period of time.
Analyzing the human genome in hours is already possible
The algorithm has been called Churchill, and part of a text file in FASTQ format; it then spreads the scans across multiple instances, so it can be easily scaled across multiple servers.
Amazon realized this and offered the team an award as part of their program related to Amazon Web Services that allowed them to use their cloud to analyze more than 1,000 complete samples of the human genome.
Along the way, he takes special care to preserve the identity of the data so that the results are completely reproducible.
Scientists demonstrated the greater precision among other automated systems, 99.99%, with a sensitivity of 99.7% and a diagnostic effectiveness of 99.66%.
This technology has already been licensed to the company GenomeNext, but also researchers have made the software available to everyone, although only for research.
