Biostatistics: Revealing analysis

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038%2Fnj7384-263a?WT.ec_id=NATUREjobs-20120216

As the challenges of analysing genomic data evolve, statistical expertise has become more valuable than ever.

As a result, statistical geneticists are now mining sequence data for directly causative mutations, rather than for SNPs. And geneticists are starting to combine data from different types of studies, using a method called integrative genomics — for instance, studying combinations of SNPs, the protein-coding genes surveyed in exome studies, epigenetic factors (heritable information not found in the DNA sequence), gene-expression factors and environmental interactions. “This field has ballooned and changed to a ridiculous degree in the past ten years, because there have been multiple waves of technological revolution,” says Gilean McVean, a statistical geneticist at the University of Oxford, UK. “As genomics becomes a much more integrated part of health care, things are going to change again and new opportunities will open up, so it's a good time to be a statistical geneticist.”

The challenge is to find true associations within the huge volumes of data without getting duped by the errors that tend to affect data sets of this magnitude, says Lucia Hindorff, an epidemiologist at the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Companies such as Pacific Biosciences, Illumina in San Diego, California, and Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California, are developing new methods for sequencing and need people who can come up with ways to analyse the new forms of data that will be produced.

“There's a massive amount of data being generated, particularly by next-generation sequencing platforms, and the cost of the analysis is now greater than the cost of the data generation,” she says. “Finding the right people to analyse those data is a challenge.”

“The more you understand software and computer science, the better off you are; writing software is 90% of what we're doing,” says Alexander.