Genomic information infrastructure after the deluge

The advent of next-generation sequencing technology has led to a profound shift in the economics of genomics. Sequencing costs have fallen more than a hundredfold over the past four years, and this rate of reduction is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The availability of cheap DNA sequencing has changed the cost of a variety of experiments - gaining a near-complete bacterial sequence costs a few hundred dollars in consumables, whereas mid-size genomes are amenable to a single grant proposal. A number of large genomes, such as those of vertebrates (for example, the turkey) have been undertaken by small consortia of interested laboratories. In addition, there are a variety of novel assays, such as RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), transposon mutagenesis and chromatin immunoprecipitation and sequencing (ChIP-seq) in which low-cost sequencing has replaced other readout platforms such as nucleic acid hybridization. Understanding these data rests fundamentally on well curated, up-to-date annotation for reference genomes, which can be leveraged for other species. However, the ability of the scientific community to maintain such resources is failing as a result of the onslaught of new data and the disconnect between the archival DNA databases and the new types of information and analysis being reported in the scientific literature. In this article, we propose a new structure for genomic information resources to address this problem.Dramatic falls in the consumable costs of DNA sequencing have not fundamentally changed the need for computational analysis to process and interpret the information produced. Indeed, the need has increased as the volume and complexity of the data have risen. There has, therefore, been a profound shift towards a higher intensity of informatics in biological research, with bioinformatics becoming a necessary component of many, if not most, molecular biology groups. The analysis of new genome-wide experiments typically requires the presence of