One Codex, a Y Combinator-backed company, wants to be the go-to spot for searching through genomic data, TechCrunch reports.
Nick Greenfield and Nik Krumm, the company founders, currently offer a beta version of their platform, which searches through the company's database of some 30,000 bacteria, viruses, and fungi. That database draws on RefSeq 65 Complete Genomes database and the National Center for Biotechnology Information repository.
TechCrunch says that uploading a test dataset to the One Codex platform took less than a twentieth of a second, while it took two and a half minutes to upload the same dataset to Blast. Any FASTA or FASTQ file can be classified by the program.
Greenfield and Krumm are also looking toward the clinic, particularly the clinical infectious disease sector. "Instead of using a specific test for tuberculosis, the doctor would take a sample, sequence that sample and transform that biology into data, and then exhaustively search that data against all the pathogens and they'll be able to tell you if you have TB, the type of TB and maybe this TB has antibiotic resistance," Greenfield tells TechCrunch