AsianScientist (Jun. 25, 2013) – Scientists in Singapore have developed a method to quickly cut through noise and generate a unified and simplified analysis of high-throughput sequencing data.
High-throughput DNA sequencing has revolutionized the study of molecular biology and human disease, yielding major insights into cancer, infectious diseases, Parkinson’s disease and many developmental disorders.
However, high-throughput DNA sequencing generates massive amounts of data which presents difficulties in analysis.
It was also generally believed that a different method of analysis was required for each type of sequence data. Therefore, each new data type was treated as a completely new analysis problem, resulting in a tremendous number of different analytical methods to solve them.
In their study, published in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists used a technique known as a pre-whitening matched filter which is well known in electrical engineering and widely used in cell phones and radar.
The technique, when adapted to the analysis of high-throughput DNA sequencing, produced surprisingly accurate results: after using the filter, the scientists found that results were uniformly better than other existing algorithms at a whole range of analysis tasks.
According to the scientists, the method will be particularly useful in deciphering data obtained from sequencing clinical samples taken from patients.
The article can be found at: Kumar et al. (2013) Uniform, Optimal Signal Processing Of Mapped Deep-Sequencing Data.
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Source: A*STAR; Illustration: Madison Guy/Flickr.
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