Studying the human genome is the cutting edge of biomedical science. Now, some San Antonio researchers focused on that pursuit have gotten a big boost to their efforts.
It’s part of your tax dollars at work. More than $2 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been granted to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. It will buy computer power to add to the 3,000 high speed processors already at work at the Foundation’s AT&T Genomics Computing Center. The processors calculate important genetic information scientists have never been able to get their hands on before.
“This is going to let us go up to 8,000 processors so it’s more than double our current capacity,” explained John Blangero, Ph.D., a statistical geneticist and director of the computing center. “It will more than two times speed up our discovery pace.”
The billions of bits of information encoded on the genome make it impossible for humans to find answers doing the math on their own. It’s like looking for needles in haystacks. That’s why computers are essential to the quest.
Statistical geneticists can use the processors to do the sifting for them, teasing out the genes that could serve as possible targets for therapies.
Scientists at SFBR are looking at genes that cause common global health problems like heart disease, diabetes and psychiatric disorders.
“There are many genes involved in most diseases and also many environmental factors that might interact with these genes, making it a wondrous puzzle to all put together,” Blanger said. “So we’re very excited about this. It’s absolutely impossible to do without enormous amounts of computing.”
Besides the computing power, the economic stimulus money will also help increase data storage ten-fold, an important part of keeping information safe.
