Is Amazon In Your Stomach Lining?
Well, not exactly. Except for whatever delicious things you may have shopped for and purchased on Amazon, then no, Amazon is nowhere to be found in your body. However, some really interesting research is taking place in the Amazon Web Services Cloud by NIH and the results could help your stomach lining stay healthy. You see, it turns out it is really difficult and expensive to pull all the data sets together in one place to analyze and reach useful conclusions about the thousands of species of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that colonize our skin and moist linings of the digestive, respiratory, and urogenital tracts. Yuck. I hope you are not eating while reading this.
Researchers are just beginning to assess the impact of these microbial inhabitants on health and disease. And they have generated a ton of data trying to figure this out. In fact, there are now approximately 14 terabytes of sequence data—enough information to fill more than 3,000 standard DVDs. And get this for any of you Bill Nye The Science Guy fans out there: In total, the microbiome is estimated to be over 100 times larger than the human genome, which itself is not a definite size but in in a perfect world is 3 billion letters or 700 megabytes per person.
Bottom line: by bringing together data and tools using Amazon Web Services, and due to the initial guidance and expertise provided by DLT Solutions, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will encourage greater scientific collaboration and data sharing, which in turn will help advance science and ideally decrease the rate of disease growth and spread.
And this could make all of our stomach linings feel a little bit better.
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