Cofactor hits 50 trillion bases

On April 25th, National DNA day was celebrated to commemorate the 1953 publication of a paper in Nature by Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin on the structure of DNA. Every year, I think about how far things have come in the 65 years since that paper and in the 20 years that I have worked in Genetics. I think about everything we now know and what things we have yet to learn about DNA and RNA.

In addition to celebrating DNA day, my team celebrated a milestone: Cofactor completed 1,000 runs on one of our sequencing platforms. What does 1,000 runs look like? It represents 400 billion individual sequencing reads and more than 50 trillion individual bases. Each base providing information on disease, treatment, and in recent years, building key signatures for our RNA-signature database.

For perspective, my PhD thesis in 2003 was based on the entire public repository of EST data. EST data was the predecessor to modern day RNA-seq and at that time it was composed of roughly 2 billion bases and took more than six years to generate. In another year, I’m sure our team will look back on these 50 trillion bases we just completed as chump-change given the speed and scale things are happening in genomics. But until next year, let’s celebrate all that data and all that can be gleaned from it.

Maybe April 26th should be National RNA day, since RNA follows DNA? (National RNA day doesn’t exist, I checked Wikipedia). What would represent the seminal RNA paper? Maybe it is yet to be written?