Information engineering infrastructure for life sciences and its implementation in China

Abstract

Biological data, represented by the data from omics platforms, are accumulating exponentially. As some other data-intensive scientific disciplines such as high-energy physics, climatology, meteorology, geology, geography and environmental sciences, modern life sciences have entered the information-rich era, the era of the 4th paradigm. The creation of Chinese information engineering infrastructure for pan-omics studies (CIEIPOS) has been long overdue as part of national scientific infrastructure, in accelerating the further development of Chinese life sciences, and translating rich data into knowledge and medical applications. By gathering facts of current status of international and Chinese bioinformatics communities in collecting, managing and utilizing biological data, the essay stresses the significance and urgency to create a 'data hub' in CIEIPOS, discusses challenges and possible solutions to integrate, query and visualize these data. Another important component of CIEIPOS, which is not part of traditional biological data centers such as NCBI and EBI, is omics informatics. Mass spectroscopy platform was taken as an example to illustrate the complexity of omics informatics. Its heavy dependency on computational power is highlighted. The demand for such power in omics studies is argued as the fundamental function to meet for CIEIPOS. Implementation outlook of CIEIPOS in hardware and network is discussed.