Genomics

To study the strategies animals use to navigate the world around them, researchers analyse the behaviour of roundworms to create a model system. The project faced a number of data challenges that threatened to hold the team back from their scientific goal.

Without a direct connection across the Danish NREN, the national hospital Rigshospitalet would not have been able to use its new gene sequencing equipment.

When the Sheba Cancer Research Center in Tel Aviv wanted to transfer 300 terabytes of data from the US National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Genomics in Chicago to local storage to advance their research, they thought the process would be relatively straightforward. It wasn't, and so they sought advice from Israel's NREN to find the solution.

One of the major trends in scientific research is the increase in data volume. Science is increasingly data-driven when datasets are on the tera-scale level. Once, only particle physicists produced these huge amounts of data, but now many other branches of science do too and a new service aims to make crunching these data easier for researchers.

Genome researchers in the Netherlands work closely together in the field of omics data (such as genomic and metabolomic data). To ensure the data can be shared easily and securely, E-LAN network technology is being piloted in a shared network environment.

ARES (Advanced networking for the EU genomic Research) is implementing novel genome content distribution solutions to make large data sets accessible to healthcare practitioners for better patient care. Robust and bottleneck-free data networks are key to the success of this vital undertaking.

Eske Willerslev, one of the world’s leading experts in ancient DNA, DNA degradation, and evolutionary biology, is using powerful DNA sequencing technology to reveal fundamentally new insights, reconstructing the past 50.000 years of human history.

The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and SURF are collaborating on a campus network infrastructure optimized for sending research data. The aim is to create a blueprint for an architecture to help researchers collaborate on data-intensive research. The first use case is focusing on crop genome data.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) near Cambridge, UK, distributes datasets worldwide using R&E connectivity. This biological data enables the discovery of new drugs, new diagnostics and increasingly new agro-chemicals. The Institute's work, which includes the 1000 Genomes Project, has generated petabytes of data and this growth is showing no signs of abating.

Genomics is generating new insights into the genetic causes of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and congenital disorders, and promises to transform healthcare. In Australia, a specialized high-performance network has been deployed for the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics, the largest genome sequencing centre in the southern hemisphere, helping to close the gap between research and the clinic.

A dedicated line between two supercomputers in Denmark allows biomedical researchers to share data faster and easier than before, helping them carry out their research into the relationship between genetics and psychiatric illnesses.

Today’s scientists are riding an unprecedented wave of discovery, but the immensity of the data needed to facilitate many of these breakthroughs is creating internet roadblocks that are becoming increasingly detrimental to research. With an eye to the future, Clemson University researchers are playing a leading role in developing state-of-the-art methods to transfer these enormous data sets.