A bioinformatics research team from the School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI, led by Dr. Mathew Palakal and his students Deepali Jhamb and Akshay Desai, Computer and Information Science student Premkumar Duraiswamy, and Research Scientist Dr. Meeta Pradhan is one of the winning teams in an international challenge set forth by the organizers of the 12th Annual International Conference on Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA). The challenge was to find discernible patterns of meaningful information in the genomic data of 38 human subjects (7 terabytes of genome data) from the Korean Personal Genome Project.
The team developed an innovative systems biology pipeline for the analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) data, focusing on the interrelationships between genes with rare variants. Through their innovative big data analytics methods, they identified the prevalence of genes in two major domains: neurodegenerative diseases and tumor related genes. This observation suggests that the Korean population might be more susceptible to these two major classes of complex diseases, when compared with other populations.
The computing power necessary for the project involved some 100 terabytes of storage and 100 gigabytes of RAM, generously provided by IU’s National Center for Genome Analysis Support under Director, Dr. William Barnett.
As one of the winning teams, the group has been invited to present their findings at the CAMDA conference in Berlin, July 19-20th.
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