Chapter 1. Introduction
We live in a time of great opportunity: technological advances are making it possible to generate incredibly detailed and comprehensive data about everything, from the sequence of our entire genomes to the patterns of gene expression of individual cells. Not only can we generate this type of data, we can generate a lot of it.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a stunning growth in the amount of sequencing data produced worldwide, enabled by a huge reduction in cost of short read sequencing, a technology that we explore in Chapter 2 (Figure 1-1). Recently developed and up-and-coming technologies like long-read sequencing and single-cell transcriptomics promise a future filled with similar transformative drops in costs and greater access to ’omics experimental designs than ever before.
Figure 1-1. Recorded growth of sequencing datasets up to 2015 and projected growth for the next decade (top); growth in data production at the Broad Institute (bottom).1
The Promises and Challenges of Big Data in Biology and Life Sciences
Anyone, from individual labs to large-scale institutions, will soon be able to generate enormous amounts of data. As of this writing, projects that are considered large include whole genome sequences for hundreds of thousands of genomes. Over the next decade, we can expect to see projects sequencing millions of genomes and transcriptomes, ...
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