Why Is The Growth Rate Of The Trace Archive Decreasing?

Question

[Mutated_Dater]

Hello

I saw this great post about how someone has plotted the growth rate of the trace archive. Given all the articles talking about the bioinformatics data deluge/tsunami/bonanza I was suprised to see the growth curve decreasing. Just in case I was going mad I searched the page for the word 'log' to make sure it wasn't a log plot showing exponential growth. Is there any particular reason why growth rate is decreasing in this archive? I just though this was interesting and wondered if anyone had any comments

thanks a lot

[Mutated_Dater]

I find that comment snide. Is that in-keeping with the general ethos of the scientific community? I'm not from a biology background and I did not realise the point Daniel kindly elucidated below. I'm not sure why you needed to go out of your way to type a comment to belittle me.

[Jeremy Leipzig]

yeah and why aren't more new MIDI ringtones coming out these days?

[Mutated_Dater]

I find that comment sneyd. Is that in-keeping with the general ethos of the scientific community? I'm not from a biology background and I did not realise the point Daniel kindly elucidated below. I'm not sure why you needed to go out of your way to type a comment to belittle me.

[Jeremy Leipzig]

my apologies. here's the deal though - no archive can really hope to hold 1TBp runs which are coming from present-day NGS sequencers. They will either hold an alignment, or SNP calls, or an assembly, but they cannot store or serve that much raw data.

Answer 1

[User 59]

Perhaps because we don't do as much capillary sequencing anymore? Jeremy was alluding to that there I imagine. The Trace archive only holds data from gel/capillary platforms. Whilst they are still in use they do not constitute (I would imagine) the bulk of modern sequencing output.

I think its policy these days to throw away 'raw' data from Illumina, 454 and SOLiD machines, it takes up too much space. Just bases and qualities please, in a fairly standard text format. That takes up quite enough space as it is..

The SRA/ENA are the repositories for NGS data - so maybe you should look at them to see what the rate of growth is for current sequencing technologies.