Industry Expert Blogs

By David Lecomber, Arm

Genomics has been absolutely transformational to public health and continues to deliver benefits for us all. To achieve its many results, involves a significant and growing amount of computing in Cloud and on-prem data centers, at research centers, hospitals, and the wider life sciences industry.

Reference-guided assembly is an essential stage in many workflows in this field. For a typical patient, a swab leads to a sample being sequenced in a sequencing machine. And the output of this machine is gigabytes of fragments (substrings of the A, C, G, and T DNA bases). These reads are “aligned” against a complete human genome from a (standard) reference individual to establish where those reads “fit” and assemble large sections of the genome of the patient.