File too large? Genome data compression a hit with gene-sequencing companies

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In India, Geneformics is looking at the growing trend and popularity of genome data in medical, biotech and other fields and wondering how all this data will be stored. They now have a compression solution to store all that data that current computers, even worldwide, simply can’t store. Just one sequenced human genome can take up 200 to 300 gigabytes, and with many genomes now being mapped out in research, healthcare, and other areas, a data storage solution is very much needed.

Rafael Feitelberg, CEO of Geneformics, told Times of Israel, “If you want to create gene banks, the mere size of the data is going to be very, very prohibitive. With compression, we will reduce the footprint by up to 90 percent. In addition, by having an intelligent tiering at the granular level of the genomic data, then we can even increase those savings more.” Geneformics has two of the world’s largest gene-sequencing organizations as customers, but they won’t give out how their proprietary data compression works.