Promoting the use of next-gen sequence data to maintain the research environment for data-driven biology

Poster presentation at Cold Spring Harbor meeting on biological data science.

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In order to promote life science researches in Japan, National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC: http://biosciencedbc.jp/en/) makes biological databases easier to use. In collaboration with NBDC on technology development, Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS: http://dbcls.rois.ac.jp/en/) has been tackling the problem how to organize big data in lifescience including huge amount of nucleotide sequence data from next generation sequencers(next-gen sequence data) and various types of gene expression data.

In order to promote the use of next-gen sequence data, our team has just moved to National Institute of Genetics, where DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ) is located, and we have sorted out data deposited in Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with DDBJ, which collaboratively holds SRA. The statistics of SRA has been maintained based on study types, sequencer types (platform) and species of samples by analyzing metadata of SRA, and these information is available from our DBCLS SRA website (http://sra.dbcls.jp/). Notably, we are collecting SRA entries associated with publications and diseases, and these search forms are also accessible for use from DBCLS SRA website.

Recently, we started collecting gene expression datasets from SRA for re-use of precious data in collaboration with DDBJ.

We will present current status of the project and utility of the system developed.