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In the age of Big Data, it turns out that the largest, fastest growing data source lies within your cells.
Quantitative biologists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in New York, found that genomics reigns as champion over three of the biggest data domains around: astronomy, Twitter, and YouTube.
The scientists determined which would expand the fastest by evaluating acquisition, storage, distribution, and analysis of each set of data. Genomes are quantified by their chemical constructs, or base pairs. Genomics trumps other data generators because the genome sequencing rate doubles every seven months. If it maintains this rate, by 2020 more than one billion billion bases will be sequenced and stored per year, or 1 exabase. By 2025, researchers estimate the rate will be almost one zettabase, one trillion billion bases, per sequence per year.
Cripes, wouldn't you hate to be the guy paying the electricity bill to process that much data?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday July 10 2015, @03:05PM
Interesting. I'll have to rethink (and further research) my understanding of cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2015, @03:39PM
You can see the error in this paper. The parameter p refers to probability of a tumor cell forming:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23396311 [nih.gov]
The models they use have simplifying assumptions built in that are incompatible with the peak in age specific incidence. Equation 5 in that paper will only increase with age. To get the peaks, the tumor cells must form much more often, but most do not generate tumors (either they go dormant or die off). It is also possible the multistage theory (cancer is caused by some kind of accumulation of errors) is totally wrong, but it makes a lot of sense.