The Key To Biological Data Integration

The advent of NGS technologies is focusing much of the attention towards the data management issue. However, more than their volume, it is the diversity of biological data which constitutes the real bioinformatics bottleneck; a bottleneck which cannot be solved through technological considerations only, such as cloud infrastructures for instance. A bioinformatics platform must indeed store, organize and give access to a wide span of data and results. First of all, the experimental data and their transformations: not only the sequence data, such as the reads, the assembly files and the resulting contigs - to name the most important ones, but also spectra or metabolic flux measurements. Through the interpretation of these data, biological entities are predicted and characterized: coding regions, regulatory signals, polypeptides, enzymes classes, peptide tags, and so on.