SeqCentral Puts DNA Sequence Crunching In The Cloud

The act of DNA sequencing results in massive amounts of data around the human genome. Currently, this data is housed in standalone super computers, which doesn’t allow for collaboration between scientists. SeqCentral is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today as a way for human genome scientists to match their data with publicly available data sets.

SeqCentral offers highly-scalable genetic sequence alignment in the cloud. The service allows you to upload your sequencing data in the clouds, and then compare your data with other scientists genome sequencing on the platform.

SeqCentral will allow scientists to compare their data to others to see if their sequencing is new or if it is “known.” The startup will bring in public data from universities, research organizations, and companies and allow you compare your sequencing to this existing data.

And SeqCentral, which costs $99 per year for scientists, wants to help you do more than just be able to find additional data, but also aims to connect members of the genomics community, encouraging collaboration around sequencing.

Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on SeqCentral:

LZ: What’s the market for this?

SC: There’s a big market of individual scientists who will use this. Market is around 1 million individual scientists.

SV: What’s the value proposition for the scientists?

SC: Scientists will be able to do analysis more easily. The amount of time it will take to produce results will be significantly less.

CC: I think the company with the most data will win. There are a bunch of players in this space.

SC: There are few other players, but we believe we’ve simplified it.