Cloud Rice helps share rice genome data
??? The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. and Hunan Huazhi Rice Biotechnology Co., Ltd. recently announced in Changsha that they will jointly promote the "Cloud Rice Project." The raw sequencing data of 3,000 green super rice genomes (referred to as rice genomes) has now been deployed on Alibaba Cloud, which means that scientific research users around the world can not only download the data for free, but also directly analyze and mine this batch of data in the cloud.
It is understood that this is the largest plant genome sequencing project in the world to date. The project originates from the results of the 3,000 rice genomes project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Cultivating Green Super Rice for Resource-Poor Areas of Africa and Asia" and the National International Cooperation Special Program. According to the agreement, the "Cloud Rice Project," based on the 3,000 rice genome sequencing data, will share the data globally free of charge, and the project team will also establish the most comprehensive "Rice Functional Genome and Breeding Information Database" to provide important reference information for basic research and breeding applications.
Dr. Li Zhikang of the Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, introduced that the overall goal of the project is to cultivate new rice varieties that can be widely adapted to the ecological environments of irrigated and rainfed areas and have various advantageous characteristics, demonstrate and promote them in target countries, promote the production capacity of hybrid rice seeds, and establish an efficient rice genotype analysis technology platform for rice molecular breeding in sub-Saharan African countries, Asia and southwestern China.
"The 3,000 rice genomes represent 95% of the diversity in 250,000 seeds. Their importance lies in the fact that the data obtained from the analysis will provide basic information resources for the basic understanding and breeding of rice," introduced Wang Bingbing, Information Director of Hunan Huazhi Rice Biotechnology Co., Ltd. At present, the amount of data obtained from this genome analysis has reached several hundred TB (terabytes). If such large-scale data is processed in a conventional way, a single research team or scientific research institution will encounter problems such as difficult downloading, difficult storage, difficult analysis and difficult computation, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive and costly. This research will accelerate the process of cultivating new varieties with high yield, high quality and wide adaptability, and comprehensively improve the level of rice genome research and molecular breeding in China and the world.