By providing every scientist with the data to work with, the database can play a vital role in annotative identification of genes and determining sequence, which are the first steps in enabling scientists to accelerate the cure-discovery process. No one knows for sure how many genes are in the human genome. Initial analysis supports the notion that there are approximately 100,000. What DoubleTwist scientists have found so far is 65,000 genes that are marked with high confidence, which means multiple analysis came to the same conclusion.
Contamination is a common problem in working with DNA sequencing.
After that, we run gene prediction algorithms on the clean data to predict exons, introns and coding regions. To do this requires an automated, high throughput, distributed processing system. We have developed such a system using Sun servers and DoubleTwist's proprietary software. In addition, we have created a data mining and visualization tool to graphically represent genomic sequences and aid interactive discovery and pattern recognition. Our genomic tool was developed in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania and their Java-based BioWidgets technology, which allows scientists to immediately identify the gene in the database as well as variations of this gene, and align sequences.