Unmet needs for analysing biological big data

Biology is awash with big data, but there is a growing gap between the accumulation of data and knowing how to use it effectively.

In a 2016 survey of 704 National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences Directorate principal investigators (BIO PIs), the most pressing unmet needs were identified as being:

• Training in integrating multiple data types;
• Training in data and meta-data management; and
• Scaling analyses for high-performance computing (HPC).

Interestingly, hardware is not the problem; data storage and HPC ranked lowest on the list of unmet needs. The participants in this survey saw training as the most important factor limiting their ability to make best use of available data.

Read the original article by Lindsay Barone, Jason Williams, and David Mocklos in PLOS Computational Biology.