Functional Genomics Applications in GRID

Abstract

A common ongoing task for Functional Genomics is to compare full organisms’ genome with those of related species, to search in huge database for functional annotation of novel sequences and to identify specific patterns of them, such as ESTs, genes, and microRNA. The prediction of these patterns has a relevant computational cost, while public genome archives exceed one billion sequence traces from over 1,000 organisms and this number is increasing rapidly as costs decline, but powerful solution must be enabled in order to perform efficient searches. This means that Functional Genomics applications require significant computational infrastructures, where reusable tools and resources can be accessed. In particular, grid computing seems to fulfill both the computational and data management requirements, even if porting applications on this infrastructure can be difficult. The implementation of a suitable environment for the management of distributed computations can provide reliable advantage, reducing the gap between the requirements of the functional genomic domain and the potential of this technology.