{"id":140368,"date":"2025-10-09T09:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T13:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=140368"},"modified":"2025-10-09T18:14:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T22:14:21","slug":"introducing-metagraph-google-for-dna-brings-order-to-biologys-big-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=140368","title":{"rendered":"(Nature) Introducing Metagraph&#8211;\u2018Google for DNA\u2019 brings order to biology\u2019s big data"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Internet has Google. Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in&nbsp;<em>Nature<\/em><sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-03219-w?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>, the search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-024-03236-1\">data housed in public repositories<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a huge achievement,\u201d says Rayan Chikhi, a biocomputing researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. \u201cThey set a new standard\u201d for analysing raw biological data \u2014 including DNA, RNA and protein sequences \u2014 from databases that can contain millions of billions of DNA letters, amounting to \u2018petabases\u2019 of information, more entries than all the webpages in Google\u2019s vast index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although MetaGraph is tagged as \u2018Google for DNA\u2019, Chikhi likens the tool to a search engine for YouTube, because the tasks are more computationally demanding. In the same way that YouTube searches can retrieve every video that features, say, red balloons even when those key words don\u2019t appear in the title, tags or description, MetaGraph can uncover genetic patterns hidden deep within expansive sequencing data sets without needing those patterns to be explicitly annotated in advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt enables things that cannot be done in any other way,\u201d Chikhi says<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-03219-w\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p><blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Metagraph: the new search engine that can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological data housed in public repositories<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Q4qtiAq8AF\">https:\/\/t.co\/Q4qtiAq8AF<\/a><\/p>&mdash; nature (@Nature) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Nature\/status\/1975959982660002227?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 8, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Internet has Google. Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in&nbsp;Nature1, the search engine can quickly sift through the staggering volumes of biological&nbsp;data housed in public repositories. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge achievement,\u201d says Rayan Chikhi, a biocomputing researcher at the Pasteur<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=140368\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140368"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140374,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140368\/revisions\/140374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}