Distributed management and analysis of omics data

Abstract

The omics term refers to different biology disciplines such as, for instance, genomics, proteomics, or interactomics. The suffix -ome is used to indicate the objects of study of such disciplines, such as the genome, proteome, or interactome, and usually refers to a totality of some sort. This paper introduces omics data and the main computational techniques for their storage, preprocessing and analysis. The increasing availability of omics data due to the advent of high throughput technologies poses novel issues on data management and analysis that can be faced by parallel and distributed storage systems and algorithms. After a survey of main omics databases, preprocessing techniques and analysis approaches, the paper describes some recent bioinformatics tools in genomics, proteomics and interactomics that use a distributed approach. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.