Abstract:
A system and method for securing an electronic transmission of a nucleotide chain. A security system is provided that comprises: a system for identifying coding and non-coding regions in the nucleotide chain; and a system for selectively encrypting only the coding regions identified in the nucleotide chain.

Description:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION  
       [0001]     1. Technical Field  
         [0002]     The present invention relates to securing genomic information, and more specifically relates to a system and method for selectively securing genetic coding regions being communicated over a network using web services.  
         [0003]     2. Related Art  
         [0004]     Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is a term of art for applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time—usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.  
         [0005]     In one important application, grid computing technologies enable the sharing of bioinformatics data from different sites by creating a virtual organization of the data. Specifically, bioinformatics grids allow the sharing of geographically distributed bioinformatics data. Thus, genetic research results can be stored on a local system and shared with the research community immediately. Moreover, users no longer need to know the location of their target information, but are able to access and retrieve data in a transparent manner. This paradigm is extremely appropriate for many types of bioinformatics research efforts, including large-scale genomic and proteomic activities.  
         [0006]     Grid technologies are feasible thanks in part to a standardized network technology referred to as web services. Web services (sometimes called application services) are network services that are made available from an application server for web users or other web-connected programs. The use of web services is a major web trend for communicating data and services on the Internet. Because web services can be implemented on a peer-to-peer basis, and not just on a central server, it lends itself to grid computing.  
         [0007]     Standardized data exchange within web services is enabled with the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. In a typical bioinformatics application, XML documents are utilized to hold important information, such as nucleotide chains and the identification of genetic sequences, which are communicated remotely to the computational grid.  
         [0008]     While the use of web services and computational grids provide numerous advantages when applied to bioinformatics, there are several challenges that remain. One of the challenges with using web services for bioinformatics relates to security. Existing secure web service standards only provide encryption mechanisms for either specific attributes of the XML message, or the entire XML message. However, because nucleotide chains are very large, e.g., it is not unusual for a chain to comprise many megabytes, encrypting and decrypting the entire chain requires a significant amount of computational time. For example, the magnaporthe grisea genome has approximately 40 millions basepairs, and the length of a human genome is approximately 3,000 million basepairs. Accordingly, a need exists for a system for handling and selectively securing regions of bioinformatics sequences being transmitted and processed in a web services environment.  
       SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION  
       [0009]     The present invention addresses the above-mentioned problems, as well as others, by providing a system and method for providing security to a nucleotide chain over a network by encrypting only selected regions of the chain. In a first aspect, the invention provides a security system for securing an electronic transmission of a nucleotide chain, comprising: a system for identifying coding and non-coding regions in the nucleotide chain; and a system for selectively encrypting only the coding regions identified in the nucleotide chain.  
         [0010]     In a second aspect, the invention provides a method for securely transmitting a nucleotide chain, comprising: identifying coding and non-coding regions in the nucleotide chain; selectively encrypting only the coding regions identified in the nucleotide chain to generate encrypted coding regions and unencrypted non-coding regions; and transmitting the encrypted coding regions and unencrypted non-coding regions.  
         [0011]     In a third aspect, the invention provides a program product stored on a recordable medium for encoding a nucleotide chain, comprising: means for identifying coding and non-coding regions in the nucleotide chain; and means for selectively encrypting only the coding regions identified in the nucleotide chain.  
         [0012]     In a fourth aspect, the invention provides a program product stored on a recordable medium for decoding an encoded nucleotide chain, comprising: means for identifying coding and non-coding regions in the encoded nucleotide chain; means for selectively decrypting only the coding regions identified in the encoded nucleotide chain; and means for reassembling the coding and non-coding regions to generate a decoded nucleotide chain.  
     
    
     BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS  
       [0013]     These and other features of this invention will be more readily understood from the following detailed description of the various aspects of the invention taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:  
         [0014]      FIG. 1  depicts a bioinformatics system for securely communicating an encoded nucleotide chain in accordance with the present invention.  
         [0015]      FIG. 2  depicts an encrypting system in accordance with the present invention.  
         [0016]      FIG. 3  depicts a decrypting system in accordance with the present invention. 
     
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION  
       [0017]     Referring now to the drawings,  FIG. 1  depicts a bioinformatics system  11  for communicating an encoded nucleotide chain  12  from a first application  10  to a second application  20 . In one exemplary embodiment, applications  10  and  20  provide a query or search system wherein application  10  provides a remote application for inputting a nucleotide chain query, and application  20  provides a bioinformatics database, which can be queried with the inputted nucleotide chain. In other possible embodiments, applications  10  and  20  may represent any two systems that communicate bioinformatics data, for example, applications  10  and  20  may represent nodes within a computational grid, a system for uploading bioinformatics information to a database, a client and server, two servers, email applications, etc.  
         [0018]     In the embodiment depicted in  FIG. 1 , data transfer between applications  10  and  20  is implemented using web services  16 , which utilizes one or more XML documents  24  to transmit the encoded nucleotide chain  13 . Application  10  includes a nucleotide chain encrypting system  14  for encrypting portions of chain  12 , and application  20  includes a decrypting system  18  for decrypting an encoded chain  13 . Obviously, either or both applications  10  and  20  may include both an encrypting and a decrypting system to facilitate secure bi-directional data transfers.  
         [0019]     As noted above, encrypting an entire nucleotide chain can be a computationally intensive process. To address this, the present invention encrypts only selected coding regions of the nucleotide chain  12 . Coding regions, i.e., exons, are the only part of a nucleotide chain that convey information about the genome being studied. The non-coding regions or introns, represent junk DNA that do not convey information about the genome. In accordance with the present invention, the non-coding regions are not encrypted, thereby greatly reducing the computational requirements of bioinformatics system  11 . As shown in  FIG. 1 , an encoded chain  13  is generated using XML document(s)  24  comprising encrypted chain data  26  (comprised of coding regions) and unencrypted chain data  28  (comprised of non-coding chain data).  
         [0020]     Referring now to  FIGS. 2 and 3 , exemplary embodiments of nucleotide chain encrypting system  14  and nucleotide chain decrypting system  16  are described in further detail. As shown in  FIG. 2 , nucleotide chain encrypting system  14  includes a coding region identification system  29  that receives a nucleotide chain  12  and identifies the coding regions  30  and non-coding regions  32  in the chain  12 . Systems for handling this process are well known in the art, and are therefore not explained in further detail herein. Coding region identification system  30  splits nucleotide chain  12  into “islands” of coding and non-coding regions  30 ,  32 , e.g., 
        [non-coding region] [coding region] [non-coding region] [coding region] . . . . 
 
 The coding regions  30  are encrypted, in this case, using cipher block chain (CBC) encryption system  34 . CBC is known encryption technique that encrypts a sequence of bits as a single unit, or block, with a cipher key. CBC uses a chaining mechanism that allows the decryption of a block of ciphertext to depend on all the preceding ciphertext blocks. Thus, the validity of a block is contained in the immediately previous cipertext block. Accordingly, the validity of each coding region can be proved by the immediately preceding coding region. While CBC is a particularly robust solution for this type of application, it should be recognized that any encryption, encoding, or security technique could be utilized to secure the coding regions  30 , and thus fall within the scope of this invention. 
       
 
         [0022]     XML document packaging system  36  receives the encrypted coding regions  30  and unencrypted non-coding regions  32 , and “packages” the regions in one or more XML documents  24 . The regions can be packaged in any manner, e.g., each region could be stored into a unique XML document; multiple regions could be stored in a single XML document; multiple regions could be stored in multiple XML documents, etc. It should be understood that nucleotide chain encrypting system  14  describes one exemplary embodiment for encrypting and packaging coding and non-coding regions  30 ,  32 , and that other embodiments are possible and fall within the scope of the invention. For instance, nucleotide chain encrypting system  14  could package the regions  30 ,  32  into one or more XML documents before the coding regions  30  are encrypted.  
         [0023]     The following is an exemplary XML document containing coding and non-coding regions of a simplified nucleotide sequence: 
        CGATCCAA . . . CAGAGTCCAGGACCCAA . . . ATGAAACGTCCATT        
 
         [0025]     wherein the bolded nucleotides indicate coding regions, and “ . . . ” indicates nucleotides omitted for brevity purposes.  
                                   &lt;XML doc&gt;doc 1&lt;/XML doc&gt;       &lt;Sequence Name&gt;Nuc Seq 1&lt;/Sequence Name&gt;         &lt;non-coding_region.1&gt;CGATCCAA...CAG&lt;/non-coding_region.1&gt;         &lt;coding_region.1&gt;AGTCCA&lt;/coding_region.1&gt;         &lt;non-coding_region.2&gt;GGACCCAA...ATG&lt;/non-coding_region.2&gt;         &lt;coding_region.2&gt;AAACGTCCATT&lt;/coding_region.2&gt;                  
 
         [0026]     In the above example, coding_region. 1  and coding_region. 2  are encrypted to secure the exact coding sequences that convey information about the genome being studied. As noted, using CBC, the validity of coding_region. 2  can be proved based on coding_region. 1 . Non-coding_region. 1  and non-coding_region. 1  are not encrypted since they do not convey any relevant information. Obviously, the exact format (e.g., tag names, etc.) of XML document(s)  24  can be implemented in any workable/desirable manner.  
         [0027]     Referring to  FIG. 3 , nucleotide chain decrypting system  16  is shown, which is used to regenerate nucleotide chain  12  from XML document(s)  24 . Nucleotide decrypting system  16  includes an XML document parsing system  46 , which identifies the encrypted coding regions  42  and unencrypted coding regions  44 . Encrypted coding regions  42  are subsequently decrypted by CBC decryption system  40 . Once decrypted, chain reassembly system  48  reassembles the regions back to the original nucleotide chain  12 .  
         [0028]     It is understood that the systems, functions, mechanisms, methods, engines and modules described herein can be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software. They may be implemented by any type of computer system or other apparatus adapted for carrying out the methods described herein. A typical combination of hardware and software could be a general-purpose computer system with a computer program that, when loaded and executed, controls the computer system such that it carries out the methods described herein. Alternatively, a specific use computer, containing specialized hardware for carrying out one or more of the functional tasks of the invention could be utilized. The present invention can also be embedded in a computer program product, which comprises all the features enabling the implementation of the methods and functions described herein, and which—when loaded in a computer system—is able to carry out these methods and functions. Computer program, software program, program, program product, or software, in the present context mean any expression, in any language, code or notation, of a set of instructions intended to cause a system having an information processing capability to perform a particular function either directly or after either or both of the following: (a) conversion to another language, code or notation; and/or (b) reproduction in a different material form.  
         [0029]     The foregoing description of the invention has been presented for purposes of illustration and description. It is not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise form disclosed, and obviously, many modifications and variations are possible. For instance, while the present invention has been described with reference to a system utilizing XML documents, the concepts and techniques could be applied to any system for communicating electronic data. Such modifications and variations that may be apparent to a person skilled in the art are intended to be included within the scope of this invention as defined by the accompanying claims.