UCSC Center for Genomic Science and Minority Outreach Program

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The UCSC Genome Browser (genome.ucsc.edu) is a vital resource for the biomedical community, providing timely, convenient access to sequence and annotations for the human and all other vertebrate reference species genomes, along with selected model invertebrates. However, the enormous capacity of next-generation sequencing platforms is rapidly outstripping all of the resources we can provide. Additionally, biomedical datasets are increasingly deemed to potentially contain identifying data, which raises substantial privacy protection issues. In this proposal, we outline a project to expand the Genome Browser architecture to address these growing data volume and privacy requirements. Our preliminary studies indicate that cloud computing and a web services model (such as is supported by Amazon) may provide a good solution to our data storage requirements and offer a high-performance solution for mapping, visualizing, and analyzing next-generation sequencing data, as well as providing a personalized browsing solution for biomedical research scientists who require an individual instance of the Genome Browser for confidentiality or configurability reasons, but wish to avoid the overhead of installing a local mirror of our browser. Through this project we plan to complete a feasibility study of the cloud computing solution and investigate (and potentially prototype) a web services architecture for the Genome Browser. We will also streamline the Genome Browser mirror site installation package for those labs that still require a local copy of the browser. Through this work, we will enhance biomedical research through an enhanced Genome Browser toolset that provides high-performance access to large datasets and controlled access for the visualization and analysis of confidential datasets.