I always look forward to our field trips, so I would say that the highlight for this week would be the trip to NovogeneAIT. Before the trip, I had been to Biopolis before and I knew it to be a hub for government agencies and other government-supported research companies. From what Robson had shared during the tutorial, I had the impression that NovogeneAIT was a very big company (given that they had multiple sequencing centres around the world. I’m not sure if I was mistaken but I think he was referring to the sequencing centres of Novogene, right? NovogeneAIT being the joint venture only here in Singapore. In any case, this made me expect a much larger space, so I was very surprised when they gave us a tour of a much smaller area. Nevertheless, I think that this still impresses me because they are able to process a large number of genome samples even with this small space and equipment. It really speaks for how advanced the processing of the HiSeq and NextSeq they are using is, that these few machines alone can produce so many libraries.
On that note, it really interested me when they were talking about the eventual goal to be able to sequence a full human genome for just $100. In a matter of a few years, the price has gone down to just around a thousand dollars compared to how expensive it was before. That means that one day, sequencing will become so readily accessible at an affordable price, we might be able to advance research at an exponentially fast rate as well since genome sequencing is being applied in many scientific areas. On the other hand, it also implies the business race of manufacturing companies to design faster and more advanced processors to be able to handle even more data at a cheaper cost. Seeing the sequencing machines reminded me of the development of computers from really huge machines that take up an entire room to the laptops and iPads that we see today. I look forward to the day we will be able to have a table-top sequencer that can process as many samples as the latest model of NovaSeq today.
One of the confusing things for me was the fact that they still relied on physical servers, although they are looking at exploring cloud servers and cloud processing. One of the biggest limitations is that they have to clear the servers of old data after 45 days, and only the processed data is being backed up into their cloud server. What if a client wanted to retrieve old data that was past 45 days? Or what if they wanted the raw data for some reason? Data storage is a big issue for a company like NovogeneAIT that has to handle terabytes of data every day. I think that data management is really important not just for big companies but even on an individual level. Keeping things organised and backed up properly makes it easier if you need to pass on the data to someone else.
JAN ANNE 