A Bioinformatics Story

How many bioinformaticians are tied up doing genomic data management work when they could be doing more bioinformatics?

Here’s a light-hearted tale about software developers building systems to manage data at scale so that bioinformaticians can focus on what they do best: developing bioinformatics pipelines for data analysis.

Bioinformatic pipelines link together different software tools within a contained environment. Whereas data management requires linking disparate systems together through complex integration across various environments. And that’s where software developers come in – designing and developing complex systems is what they do best.

A Bioinformatics Story

Once upon a time there was a bioinformatician, they loved developing bioinformatic pipelines.

One day they were asked, “Can you get the data from A to B to C?”

“Yes, I can do that, ….. hmmm, system integration,” and they wrote some code for each of the steps.

Then they were asked, “Now, can you get the data from D to E to F?”
“Sure, I’ll just change what I did the first time.”

Bioinformaticians from across the land were all doing the same thing. Genomics was happening, thanks to their code. Then the bioinformaticians got together, “We don’t get to do as much bioinformatics anymore”

Things were getting worse, they still didn’t have time for bioinformatics. Their code needed to be fixed a lot and everything needed to run faster. Much faster.

Genomics was booming. Or so they thought. “We can’t keep all the steps running properly, genomics is getting slower”.

Meanwhile, in a land far far away, there was a software developer, they loved developing software systems. One day they were asked, “Can you get the data from A to B to C?”

“Yes, we can design a system to do this so that it works for many different steps that might needed in the future.”

They worked with solution architects, bioinformaticians, business analysts, project managers, and other software developers. Together they carefully built the system, layer upon layer, piece by piece.

At first no-one could see any progress. Then at last, the first genomic data system was built. Labs from across the land tried it and everyone had ideas to make it better.

The improved system was finally ready. They called it Genomical.

Genomics was happening faster and easier than before. And the bioinformaticians were the happiest they’d ever been, because they were doing bioinformatics again.