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Speaker urges stronger bioinformatics capacity as sequencing costs fall
Summary
The lecturer said rapid advances in sequencing technology are lowering costs and expanding comparative genomics, but emphasized a shortage of bioinformaticists and software to analyze the resulting data; a planned workshop next October was cited as addressing those gaps.
Speaker 3, Lecturer, described rapid declines in sequencing cost and expanded throughput and said bioinformatics capacity is the bottleneck. “We don't have enough bioinformaticists to address the need, and secondly, we don't have the software that can really pull a lot of correlations that we're not able to do,” the lecturer said, announcing a planned workshop focused on bioinformatics in the following October that will involve NIH, NSF, USDA, DOE and Department of Defense participants.
The speaker noted that new sequencing platforms (mentioned verbally by the lecturer as “454 and Solexa”) are accelerating data production and predicted that the so-called "thousand-dollar genome" could be achievable in the near term. The talk stressed that analytical infrastructure — trained personnel and interoperable software — must scale with bench capabilities to extract biologically meaningful inferences from comparative genomics and metagenomics.
Audience members asked whether current computational tools were adequate; the lecturer characterized the gap as large and described interagency interest in convening workshops and planning for enhanced computing and human-resource investment.
The speaker framed the capacity gap as both a scientific and national-priority issue and said that some countries with large climate simulators had not yet incorporated biological systems in their models, underscoring the need for integrated computational approaches.
