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Moore’s law and the fast evolving next-generation sequencing technologies

Since several decades, Moore’s law describes the doubling time of transistors on an integrated circuit [1]. It is interesting that decreasing costs in the next-generation sequencing (NGS) outranges the effect of Moore’s law by a multiple times [2]. As a consequence, the price of sequencing by NGS technologies decreases much faster than those for e.g. data storage. Due to the recent developments in NGS technology, it is expected that the exponential growth of sequenced data in public databases [3] will continue during the next years. The question is, how can the increasing gap between Moore’s law and advances in NGS resolved regarding to storage or analyzing of the genomic data?

References:

[1] G. E. Moore: Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.

Electronics 38(8), 1965.

[2] A. Sboner, X. J. Mu, D. Greenbaum, R. K. Auerbach, M. K. Gerstein:

The real cost of sequencing: Higher than you think. Genome Biology

12(125), 2011.

[3] M.-E. Guazzaroni, A. Beloqui, P. N. Golyshin, M. Ferrer:

Metagenomics as a new technological tool to get scientific knowledge.

World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology 25(6), 2009.

Johannes Werner