Genomics Data

AbstractIn silico prediction of plant performance is gaining increasing breeders' attention. Several statistical, mathematical and machine learning methodologies for analysis of phenotypic, omics and environmental data typically use individual or a few data layers. Genomic selection is one of the applications, where heterogeneous data, such as those from omics technologies, are handled, accommodating several genetic models of inheritance. There are many new high throughput Next Generation  Sequencing (NGS) platforms on the market producing whole-genome data at a low cost. Hence, large-scale genomic data can be produced and analyzed enabling intercrosses and  fast-paced recurrent selection. The offspring properties can be predicted instead of manually evaluated in the field . Breeders have a short time window to make decisions by the time they receive data, which is one of the major challenges in commercial breeding. To implement genomic selection routinely as part of breeding programs, data management systems and analytics capacity have therefore to be in order. The traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS), which are designed to store, manage and analyze large-scale data, offer appealing characteristics, particularly when they are upgraded with capabilities for working with binary large objects. In addition, NoSQL systems were considered effective tools for managing high-dimensional genomic data. MongoDB system, a document-based NoSQL database, was effectively used to develop web-based tools for visualizing and exploring genotypic information. The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5), a member of the high-performance distributed file systems family, demonstrated superior performance with high-dimensional and highly structured data such as genomic sequencing data.