Bioinformatics at a Crossroad Again - Which Way Next?
One of our readers asked - “If genome assembly becomes a solved problem, what’s next?”
We like to broaden the comment to argue that the entire field of bioinformatics is again at a turning point, because almost all difficult computational problems related to ‘next-generation sequencing’ have been solved satisfactorily. Readers are encouraged to express their differing opinions in the comment section.
Let us first briefly mention three different phases the field of bioinformatics went through. In the first era (prior to 1999), bioinformatics was an obscure field with very few talented and die-hard practitioners, who preferred to call themselves mathematicians or computer scientists. The second era (1999-2008) was rather frustrating for those skilled practitioners, because NIH showered huge amount of money on all kinds of biologists, who were more eager to find someone manage their microarray databases and Excel spreadsheets than those working on elegant algorithms. Good computational papers written in this era got very few citations compared to database papers.
The dam broke with the advent of short-read sequencing, because it was no longer possible to analyze data in an Excel sheet. Moreover, a bigger problem emerged. It was not even clear whether the short reads (or noisy long Pacbio reads) were useful for anything, and computer scientists had to be brought back for rescue. They first showed that the short (and noisy long) reads were indeed useful, but only if new classes of algorithms were developed. Additionally, a substantial investment in expensive servers was needed. For example, PacBio reported assembling the human genome from PacBio reads in 400,000 ‘Google exascale CPU hours’, where alignment between reads took most of the time. In another example of hardware cost, servers with 512GB to 1TB RAM were often used to assemble human genome or other large genomes.
More recent developments suggest that the second criterion will not be critical going forward. This has been achieved through use of clever algorithms or non-Intel hardware. For example, Gene Myers brought down the alignment time of PacBio reads by 25-fold based on his new DALIGN algorithm. Tak-wah Lam’s group developed GPU-based algorithms to cut down the variant calling time significantly compared to GATK. Rayan Chikhi and collaborators showed how to do human genome assembly with only 1-2GB of RAM. Titus Brown developed approximate algorithms to rapidly get to the results with hardly any loss of information. Sailfish cut down the expression quantification time of RNAseq data of RSEM from days to minutes.
Those are only a few examples, but if the trend continues (and we do not see why not), it will soon be possible to do de novo assembly and analysis of RNAseq data in real time, or assemble human genome from short or long reads in less than an hour, or align 1 billion reads on to human genome in less than an hour - all in inexpensive regular-RAM servers. Speaking of quality of information, the short read noise is expected go away with proper incorporation of long PacBio data.
If all difficult problems are handled satisfactorily, what will the bioinformaticians do next? In the following few commentaries, we will provide our best answer, but please feel free to suggest any difficult problem that remains unsolved.
