Ohio Supercomputer Center to provide biologists a window into the human genomeColumbus 16 January 2001 The Ohio State University (OSU), Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), and LabBook announce that they have formed a partnership to provide life science researchers with an annotated map of the human genome. The project combines OSU's annotated human genome database, backed by OSC's computational power, with the powerful visualization and analysis capabilities of LabBook's personal discovery space. The partnership allows scientists a view of the human genome to date.
In June 2000, the international consortium of the Human Genome Project announced
that they had completed a map of the human genome sequence. However, this
important milestone is just the first step in identifying the genes hidden in
the sequence and understanding their function - a process known as annotation.
Through a novel combination of data resources, and with computational power
provided by OSC, researchers at OSU have identified thousands of genes and
obtained clues to their function. LabBook's genomic discovery system displays
this information in a highly intuitive and interactive environment, enabling the
researcher to extract meaning from the sequence.
The annotation project at OSU was directed by Dr. Bo Yuan, Head of
Bioinformatics in the Human Genetics Cancer Program. "We have combined accurate,
non-fragmented and non-redundant whole genome mapping of expressed genes with
comprehensive annotation," said Dr. Yuan. "Now we can truly perform hypothesis
driven queries of the human genome, which was not previously possible."
"Annotation is what makes the genome useful," agreed Dr. Fred Wright of Human
Cancer Genetics, "and we have drawn on several unique resources to discover the
genes and how they work. The OSC contribution was critical, as this work would
have literally taken years without their computing power while LabBook's
discovery system enables researchers to visualize this information in a
beautifully integrated environment." Dr. Wright expects that the LabBook
software will accelerate efforts underway at OSU to identify genes involved in
numerous diseases.
The process of annotation is extremely computationally-intensive, involving
millions of automated searches and comparisons along the 3-billion letter code
of the human DNA sequence. The necessary hardware is beyond the capabilities of
most university or industry laboratories. The supercomputing cluster machines at
OSC proved ideal for the job. "The generation of this database required a
tremendous amount of computer power," said Al Stutz of OSC. "We were fortunate
to have the Silicon Graphics 1400 cluster that provided us with this
capability."
While genomic annotation provides a solid basis for genetic research, its
usefulness remains limited without powerful software to perform queries and
visualize the results. Moreover, the human genome project has been accompanied
by an explosion of information on human genes, along with modern high-throughput
technologies for analyzing their functions. This expanding collection of
information for drug discovery holds the key to treatments for a broad range of
human diseases, but the data sources are dispersed and of limited use to
biologists who are not trained in bioinformatics. Utilizing the data effectively
requires integrating these disparate data types in a unified Web environment. To
solve this problem, OSU, LabBook and OSC are providing the OSU Human Genome
Database within LabBook's genomic discovery space.
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