Computer scientists help find a way out of a genetic data maze
In recent years, the market for direct-to-consumer genetic testing has exploded. The number of people who used at-home DNA tests more than doubled in 2017, most of them in the U.S. Some 1 in 25 American adults now know their ancestry.
As the tests become more popular, companies are grappling with how to store the accumulating data and how to process results quickly. A new tool called TeraPCA, created by computer scientists at Purdue University, is now available to help. The results were published in the journal Bioinformatics. The research is funded by NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, supporting new insights in big data analytics./.../
Despite our many physical differences, any two humans are about 99 percent the same genetically. The most common genetic variations, which contribute to the 1% that makes us different, are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced "snips").
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