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by gbveiuwlbiu 3886 days ago
Apart from data privacy and formal restrictions on sharing, what would you say the reason for this lack of public data is?

Am I right to say that the bandwidth and storage needed to upload whole genomes is prohibitive?

1 comments

We collectively just don't know. Not even in the cutting edge literature. Humanity, only has a basic understanding of what the biochemical role of many proteins is, and due too that also a similar idea of what the genes role is in the rather complicated system of making a functioning human.

Bandwidth and storage are infrastructure issues that could be solved with enough money. In biology we are still lacking good technical solutions to do the chemistry and even something "simple" like getting a protein crystalized so we can determine its 3D structure is not trivial or cheap yet.

Fast genome and RNA sequencing are massive improvements and really help. But the basic understanding of what all those genes, regulatory and other parts do is still relatively primitive.

We often "complain" that we wish that people stopped sequencing and went back to do more biochemistry for functional characterization instead ;)