Contributions of the Petabyte Scale Sequence Search Codeathon toward efforts to scale sequence-based searches on SRA
/ Authors
Priyanka Ghosh, Kjiersten Fagnan, R. Connor, R. Pannu, Travis J. Wheeler, Mihai Pop, C. T. Brown, Tessa Pierce-Ward, Rob Patro, J. Michaelis
and 28 more authors
T. Madden, Christiam Camacho, O. Awe, Arianna I. Krinos, René K. M. Xavier, R. O. Polo, J. Roddy, Adelaide C. Rhodes, Alex Sweeten, Adrian Viehweger, Barics Ekim, H. Muralidharan, Amatur Rahman, V. W. Salazar, Andrew Tritt, T. Colligan, Katrina L. Kalantar, Genevieve R. Krause, Taylor E. Reiter, George Lesica, Artem Babaian, Victor Lin, S. Madaminov, Vadim Zalunin, D. Kristensen, Alexa Salsbury, D. Rice, J. R. Brister
/ Abstract
The volume of biological data being generated by the scientific community is growing exponentially, reflecting technological advances and research activities. The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Sequence Read Archive (SRA), which is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is a rapidly growing public database that researchers use to drive scientific discovery across all domains of life. This increase in available data has great promise for pushing scientific discovery but also introduces new challenges that scientific communities need to address. As genomic datasets have grown in scale and diversity, a parade of new methods and associated software have been developed to address the challenges posed by this growth. These methodological advances are vital for maximally leveraging the power of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. With the goal of laying a foundation for evaluation of methods for petabyte-scale sequence search, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS), and NCBI held a virtual codeathon 'Petabyte Scale Sequence Search: Metagenomics Benchmarking Codeathon' on September 27 - Oct 1 2021, to evaluate emerging solutions in petabyte scale sequence search. The codeathon attracted experts from national laboratories, research institutions, and universities across the world to (a) develop benchmarking approaches to address challenges in conducting large-scale analyses of metagenomic data (which comprises approximately 20% of SRA), (b) identify potential applications that benefit from SRA-wide searches and the tools required to execute the search, and (c) produce community resources i.e. a public facing repository with information to rebuild and reproduce the problems addressed by each team challenge.