There have been rumors for at least a couple of years now that the brain trust at Google is working on a better way to index genome sequence data. It's not that we doubt our friends at GenBank - but if history is any indicator, where Google dives in, all previous methods seem inferior (does anyone remember how we lived before Google Maps? Neither do we).
To add to the rumors, this video from Google's gallery features Tim Hubbard from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute giving a 37-minute presentation to the folks at the Googleplex. Entitled "Keeping Up With The Human Genome," the presentation looks at the data and analysis challenges in genomics and proteomics, among other things. Hubbard gave this talk a month ago, but we think it's still worth a peek.