Contributions of the Petabyte Scale Sequence Search Codeathon toward efforts to scale sequence-based searches on SRA
Abstract
The volume of biological data being generated by the scientific community is growing exponentially, reflecting technological advances and research activities. The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Sequence Read Archive (SRA), which is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is a rapidly growing public database that researchers use to drive scientific discovery across all domains of life. This increase in available data has great promise for pushing scientific discovery but also introduces new challenges that scientific communities need to address. As genomic datasets have grown in scale and diversity, a parade of new methods and associated software have been developed to address the challenges posed by this growth. These methodological advances are vital for maximally leveraging the power of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. With the goal of laying a foundation for evaluation of methods for petabyte-scale sequence search, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS), and NCBI held a virtual codeathon 'Petabyte Scale Sequence Search: Metagenomics Benchmarking Codeathon' on September 27 - Oct 1 2021, to evaluate emerging solutions in petabyte scale sequence search. The codeathon attracted experts from national laboratories, research institutions, and universities across the world to (a) develop benchmarking approaches to address challenges in conducting large-scale analyses of metagenomic data (which comprises approximately 20% of SRA), (b) identify potential applications that benefit from SRA-wide searches and the tools required to execute the search, and (c) produce community resources i.e. a public facing repository with information to rebuild and reproduce the problems addressed by each team challenge.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.06395,
title = {Contributions of the Petabyte Scale Sequence Search Codeathon toward efforts to scale sequence-based searches on SRA},
author = {Priyanka Ghosh and Kjiersten Fagnan and Ryan Connor and Ravinder Pannu and Travis J. Wheeler and Mihai Pop and C. Titus Brown and Tessa Pierce-Ward and Rob Patro and Jacquelyn S. Michaelis and Thomas L. Madden and Christiam Camacho and Olaitan I. Awe and Arianna I. Krinos and René KM Xavier and Rodrigo Ortega Polo and Jack W. Roddy and Adelaide Rhodes and Alexander Sweeten and Adrian Viehweger and Bariş Ekim and Harihara Subrahmaniam Muralidharan and Amatur Rahman and Vinícius W. Salazar and Andrew Tritt and Thomas Colligan and Katrina Kalantar and Genevieve R. Krause and Taylor Reiter and George Lesica and Artem Babaian and Victor Lin and Sergey Madaminov and Vadim Zalunin and David M. Kristensen and Alexa Salsbury and Daniel P. Rice and J. Rodney Brister},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06395},
year = {2025}
}