Patent ID: 8751166

Claim:
A method of reducing an amount of data representing a genetic sequence of an organism using a computer having a plurality of computer processing elements, the method comprising: the computer dividing a reference genome and the genetic sequence of the organism into parts and assigning each of the parts of the reference genome and the parts of the genetic sequence of the organism to one of the plurality of computer processing elements; within each computer processing element, comparing the nucleotides of the assigned part of the genetic sequence of the organism to nucleotides of the assigned part of the reference genome, to find differences where nucleotides of the genetic sequence of the organism are different from the nucleotides of the assigned part of the reference genome, and storing surprisal data in a repository, the surprisal data comprising at least a starting location of the differences within the assigned part of the reference genome, and the nucleotides from the genetic sequence of the organism which are different from the nucleotides of the assigned part of the reference genome, discarding sequences of nucleotides that are the same in the genetic sequence of the organism and the assigned part of the reference genome; the computer retrieving the parts of the surprisal data from the repository; the computer combining the parts of the surprisal data from the repository to form a complete set of surprisal data representing the differences between the genetic sequence of the organism and the reference genome; the computer storing the complete set of surprisal data in the repository; the computer recreating an entire genome of the organism by: the computer retrieving the surprisal data from the repository and dividing the surprisal data into parts; the computer retrieving the reference genome from the repository and dividing the reference genome into parts corresponding to the parts of the surprisal data; the computer assigning parts of the reference genome and corresponding parts of the surprisal data to each of a plurality of computer processing elements; each computer processing element altering the parts of the assigned reference genome based on the corresponding part of the surprisal data, by replacing nucleotides at each location in the assigned parts of the reference genome specified by the corresponding parts of surprisal data with the nucleotides from the genetic sequence of the organism in the surprisal data associated with the location, and storing the altered parts of the reference genome in the repository; the computer retrieving the altered parts of the reference genome from the repository; and the computer combining the altered parts of the reference genome together, resulting in an entire genome of the organism.