A Quick Guide to Large-Scale Genomic Data Mining

For the first several hundred years of research in cellular biology, the main bottleneck to scientific progress was data collection. Our newfound data-richness, however, has shifted this bottleneck from collection to analysis [1]. While a variety of options exists for examining any one experimental dataset, we are still discovering what new biological questions can be answered by mining thousands of genomic datasets in tandem, potentially spanning different molecular activities, technological platforms, and model organisms. As an analogy, consider the difference between searching one document for a keyword and executing an online search. While the tasks are conceptually similar, they require vastly different underlying methodologies, and they have correspondingly large differences in their potentials for knowledge discovery.