The Google of Biology.

The streets of Kherson.

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1. Nature:

The Internet has Google. Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in Nature^, the search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data housed in public repositories.

“It’s a huge achievement,” says Rayan Chikhi, a biocomputing researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “They set a new standard” for analyzing raw biological data — including DNA, RNA and protein sequences — from databases that can contain millions of billions of DNA letters, amounting to ‘petabases’ of information, more entries than all the webpages in Google’s vast index.

Although MetaGraph is tagged as ‘Google for DNA’, Chikhi likens the tool to a search engine for YouTube, because the tasks are more computationally demanding. In the same way that YouTube searches can retrieve every video that features, say, red balloons even when those key words don’t appear in the title, tags or description, MetaGraph can uncover genetic patterns hidden deep within expansive sequencing data sets without needing those patterns to be explicitly annotated in advance.

“It enables things that cannot be done in any other way,” Chikhi says. (Sources: nature.com, youtube.com. Italics mine)