Crossbow: A Cloud Computing Tool for SNP Detection
Author Information
Author(s): Ben Langmead, Michael C. Schatz, Jimmy Lin, Mihai Pop, Steven L. Salzberg
Primary Institution: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Hypothesis
Can cloud computing be effectively utilized to accelerate SNP detection and alignment in genomic data?
Conclusion
Crossbow can align and call SNPs from high-coverage human datasets in under 3 hours using cloud computing, achieving high accuracy.
Supporting Evidence
- Crossbow can analyze 38-fold coverage of the human genome in about 3 hours.
- It combines Bowtie and SOAPsnp to perform alignment and SNP detection.
- Crossbow is open source and can be run on any cluster with the required software.
Takeaway
Crossbow is a tool that helps scientists quickly find genetic differences in DNA using cloud computers, making it faster and cheaper.
Methodology
Crossbow uses Hadoop to parallelize the alignment and SNP calling processes, combining Bowtie for alignment and SOAPsnp for SNP detection.
Limitations
The performance may vary based on the specific cloud resources used and the nature of the genomic data.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
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