High-throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics: Bottlenecks and opportunities

With the emergence of high-throughput genome sequencers from various companies including Applied Biosystems, Illumina and Roche, the conventional approach of genomic investigation has been revolutionized and new applications involving these sequencers have been designed and adopted not only in genome centres, but also in general laboratories working on biological and biomedical research. These genome sequencers are capable of generating terabytes of raw data daily, posing a big challenge to various aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology, e.g. data quality assurance, data storage, cross platform data analysis standards, data comparison, data annotation and gene network analysis. The problem will become more prominent when this technology is applicable in areas such as clinical diagnosis and personalized medicine. In foreseeable future, we believe bioinformatics will be one of the major bottlenecks of the further development of biological sciences. In this talk, we present some of the genome projects in the Centre for Microbial Genomics of Proteomics of the Chinese University of Hong Kong as examples to unravel the difficulties we come across in the area of bioinformatics. Then, based on our understanding of the recent development in computational biology, possible solutions will be discussed and explored. We believe this talk can provide useful insights and future research directions for audiences who are interested in bioinformatics and computation biology.