ETH tool enables rapid searching of DNA

(CONNECT) Researchers at ETH have developed a tool with which the raw data of all DNA sequences stored in databases can be searched. Until now, researchers had to rely on descriptive metadata or download the respective datasets to access the raw data. However, with the ETH tool MetaGraph, which was first introduced in 2020 and has been continuously improved since then, the data records can now be searched using a full-text search, the ETH explains in a press release.

"It's a kind of Google for DNA," Gunnar Rätsch, data scientist at the Institute of Computer Science at ETH, is quoted as saying in the press release. Interested parties can already use MetaGraph for their own queries. Rätsch and his fellow researchers are also making MetaGraph freely available as an open source tool.

A study published on October 8 in the journal "Nature" explains how the tool works. In simple terms, MetaGraph indexes the data and displays it in complex mathematical graphs. "Mathematically speaking, it's a huge matrix with millions of columns and trillions of rows," explains Rätsch. He and his fellow researchers combine the raw and metadata and compress it by a factor of around 300.

About half of the sequence datasets available worldwide have already been indexed for MetaGraph. The remaining data sets are to follow by the end of the year. ce/hs