Comparing Apples and Oranges?: Next Generation Sequencing and Its Impact on Microbiome Analysis.

Rapid advancements in sequencing technologies along with falling costs present widespread opportunities for microbiome studies across a vast and diverse array of environments. These impressive technological developments have been accompanied by a considerable growth in the number of methodological variables, including sampling, storage, DNA extraction, primer pairs, sequencing technology, chemistry version, read length, insert size, and analysis pipelines, amongst others. This increase in variability threatens to compromise both the reproducibility and the comparability of studies conducted.

HBLAST: Parallelised sequence similarity--A Hadoop MapReducable basic local alignment search tool.

The recent exponential growth of genomic databases has resulted in the common task of sequence alignment becoming one of the major bottlenecks in the field of computational biology. It is typical for these large datasets and complex computations to require cost prohibitive High Performance Computing (HPC) to function. As such, parallelised solutions have been proposed but many exhibit scalability limitations and are incapable of effectively processing "Big Data" - the name attributed to datasets that are extremely large, complex and require rapid processing.

Digitizing humanity.

The application of ex vivo synthetic DNA as a high capacity information storage medium is well documented. Herein, we consider the potential for synthetic DNA to be incorporated as part of the human genome; providing a definitive, accessible, in vivo database of patient history.

'Big data', Hadoop and cloud computing in genomics.

Since the completion of the Human Genome project at the turn of the Century, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of genomic sequence data. A consequence of this is that the medical discoveries of the future will largely depend on our ability to process and analyse large genomic data sets, which continue to expand as the cost of sequencing decreases. Herein, we provide an overview of cloud computing and big data technologies, and discuss how such expertise can be used to deal with biology's big data sets.

Synthetic DNA: the next generation of big data storage.

With world wide data predicted to exceed 40 trillion gigabytes by 2020, big data storage is a very real and escalating problem. Herein, we discuss the utility of synthetic DNA as a robust and eco-friendly archival data storage solution of the future.

The t(8;9)(p22;p24) is a recurrent abnormality in chronic and acute leukemia that fuses PCM1 to JAK2.

We have identified a t(8;9)(p21-23;p23-24) in seven male patients (mean age 50, range 32-74) with diverse hematologic malignancies and clinical outcomes: atypical chronic myeloid leukemia/chronic eosinophilic leukemia (n = 5), secondary acute myeloid leukemia (n = 1), and pre-B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (n = 1). Initial fluorescence in situ hybridization studies of one patient indicated that the nonreceptor tyrosine kinase Janus-activated kinase 2 (JAK2) at 9p24 was disrupted. Rapid amplification of cDNA ends-PCR identified the 8p22 partner gene as human autoantigen pericentriolar material (PCM1), a gene encoding a large centrosomal protein with multiple coiled-coil domains.