The data of more than 1,000 DNA profiles has been sent through the direct data connection from sequence provider Illumina in San Diego (USA) to the SURFsara supercomputer in the Netherlands.

After whole genome sequencing, Illumina sends the data to the supercomputer of SURFsara in the Netherlands, where the data is stored securely. SURFsara, a non-profit agency available for research, guarantees safe and fast storage of all petabytes of data for Project MinE. This is a crucial part of Project MinE, as it needs more capacity for storage and analyses than any project before. Researchers can analyse their data on the SURFsara supercomputer. With a normal computer network it would take years to run analyses with the large amounts of sequencing data.

The researchers now have data of more than 3,000 DNA profiles available for analyses. In the coming months Illumina will send the data of another 2,000 sequenced DNA profiles. The direct connection ensures that the transfer of data is safe and fast. This enables researchers to focus on the analyses of the large amounts of data from whole genome sequencing with the aim to find genetic variations that might cause ALS.