Bioinformatics and Beyond: June 2023

Welcome to the June Bioinformatics and Beyond newsletter!

Someone tell 2023 to slow down, please! I got my first Christmas-related email today and felt no guilt whatsoever about deleting it immediately. Christmas does not belong in inboxes until at least November.

(Unless you are responsible for organising the Christmas night out, in which case, now is actually a very good time to get a booking organised. #protip)

Anyway, rant over. Let's get to the bioinformatics ??

This month, we are looking at the cost disparity between sequencing and analysis.

You may have noticed that sequencing costs have been falling for years while bioinformatics analysis costs haven't. In fact, your analysis costs have likely been increasing.

The good news is that the cost of sequencing a human genome decreased much more quickly and steeply than anyone predicted. The first draft of the human genome sequence cost around $300m back in 2000. Today, the cost of sequencing a human genome is under $500 dollars. In fact, while attending a conference recently, one of my colleagues learned of a company offering human genome sequencing for under $100!

(This feels like a good time to put my marketing hat on and casually mention that Fios Genomics can work with sequencing suppliers for our clients as part of a data analysis contract - contact us to learn more)

The fall in the cost of sequencing is largely due to advances in the technology used. For example, the switch from Sanger machines to new high-throughput machines reduced both sequencing times and costs, and such technologies have continued to advance.

So, why does analysis cost more compared to sequencing?

Well, when it comes to sequencing, the cost per sample decreases as you scale up the number of samples in a study. So economies of scale are at play. But economies of scale don't translate well to bioinformatics analyses. As larger volumes of data are generated, the challenges of actually analysing all of it, increase.

Although sequencing technologies have become quicker to use and cheaper to access, on the analysis side, things have become more complex, and costs are reflecting this increased complexity.

For example, just storing the sequenced data for a single human genome takes up around 1.5GB of storage, and that is just for one human genome. When analyses of multiple genomes and/or the integration of additional omics datasets are required, data transfer and storage costs can increase significantly, impacting overall analysis costs.

Also, as data volume increases, so does analysis time, and increased analysis times equate to increased analysis costs.

That's the cost disparity between sequencing and analysis in a nutshell.

While quality bioinformatics analyses are an investment, they are cost-effective and ensure that you maximise the potential of, and insights gained from, any data you generate. Without quality analysis to fully understand what sequencing data is telling you, there isn't much point in generating sequencing data in the first place.

(Want to make the most of your data? Make both our bosses happy - request a quote from Fios Genomics!)

Well, now that I've finished this newsletter I'm going to grab a snack and pour myself some orange juice. Or maybe that should be green juice. Did you know the first oranges were green? They were a cross between tangerines and pomelos.

Has anyone else never had a pomelo before? Apparently, they taste like grapefruit, so I won't be going out of my way to try one.

If you found this newsletter useful, you can subscribe to be notified when it is next published (monthly). Also, feel free to share it on LinkedIn if you think it could be of interest to your network.

Thanks for reading!

-Breige McBride,?Marketing Executive,?Fios Genomics