There was a time not so long ago when mapping the human genome seemed a task too huge to even undertake, much less succeed at. Yet humankind did exactly that and mapped genomes of a variety of other species as well. Now with the advent of Big Data scientists can do more with that information than had ever been predicted. And the implications are huge in everything from developing new medicines and hardier crops and disease resistant, high-yield livestock, to creating entirely new food sources and other things yet imagined.
The official definition of Big Data, as far as such goes, is data with “velocity, variety and volume.” More plainly put, Big Data simply means data that is too massive to manage by traditional computing means. It’s data that is measured in petabytes and exabytes rather than mere terabytes. We now have the means to search, use, manipulate, mine, and store Big Data. The tools are widely available and the costs are manageable.
This newfound capability is already showing strong promise for genetic researchers. For example, work is underway to create a single Tree of Life that combines the tens of thousands of evolutionary trees already published and enables the addition of new species as they are discovered and new results of DNA sequencing as it is completed.
“There’s a firehose of data,” said Cranston, principal investigator of the Open Tree of Life project. “[Over the years] scientists have published tens of thousands of evolutionary trees, but there’s been very little work to connect the dots and put them all together into a single resource.”
The collective results in this new single tree will uncover how 2 million named species are related to one another, where theories collide and clash, and where data holes remain to be filled. This is the first serious attempt to construct the entire Tree of Life and it could not be done without Big Data tools.
In regards to agriculture, Big Data use, be it in this new Tree of Life or in other research, will add granularity to the genetic information already known and thereby perfect genetic modification techniques and efforts. It can also fill in the blanks in our knowledge base and thus lead to new understandings and tools.
Take for example, the current conundrum on the origin of dogs. Repeated studies have falsely identified some dog breeds as ancient and branching close to the family tree at the point of domestication. The flaw in the data primarily comes from failing to account for isolation and the rederivation of breeds. “In fact, the archeological evidence suggests that some of the genetic data [on dogs] cannot be trusted at all,” say the authors of one recent study published in PNAS.
While livestock origins are better known, there is still more to be learned. In any case, Big Data will fuel new advances in livestock genetics that should flow quickly and at greatly reduced costs thereby pushing genetic work ahead by decades. Genetic markers will also likely be refined and their worth increased. But this is just the beginning of what will come from using Big Data. Only time will tell what all we really can discover.