NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The UK’s Wellcome Trust has awarded the European Bioinformatics Institute €6.3 million ($10 million) through 2012 to manage an international archive of raw DNA sequence data, EBI said yesterday.
EBI, an outpost of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK, will maintain the resource, called the Trace Archive, in collaboration with the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the US.
The Trace Archive, available here, currently contains more than 1,770 million traces from 1,262 species, which is the equivalent of 100 terabytes of data.
The resource will enable researchers to reanalyze DNA sequence rather than resequencing samples — an option that can be up to 1,000 times cheaper than regenerating sequence, EBI said.
The Trace Archive is a collaborative effort between Ewan Birney and Paul Flicek at the EBI. Flicek, head of the Vertebrate Genomics Team, said in a statement that the EBI’s “first task is to incorporate the novel types of data generated by new sequencing technologies, for example, short reads.”
EBI said that the amount of data in the archive is expected to double over the next four years.