Design of a system for bioinformatics processing of metagenomic data

Abstract

Advancements in acquiring, storing and processing information have led to a significant accumulation of large databases in the field of metagenomics—a branch of biology that deals with the study of genetic material directly recovered from environmental or clinical samples. The data collected from metagenomic experiments are massive and noisy, often containing fragmented information representing over 10,000 species. Processing and analyzing this data require software installed on supercomputers. In this paper, the authors present the design, development, and creation of a computational server system aimed at processing and analyzing bioinformatics data in metagenomics and 16S rRNA gene studies. They utilized the specialized software product Galaxy Europe for this purpose. The analysis was performed using the metagenomics-based method Targeted Amplicon Sequencing. The data was divided into three test collections in a special fasta file format. These collections were processed using the web-based Galaxy platform and two configuration variants on a high-performance cluster equipped with NVIDIA Tesla V100 32 GB GPU cards. The analysis process was optimized to reduce information processing time, and the parallel performance of the three different system configurations was investigated for the data used.