Temple F. Smith
Boston University, USA
Title: How far back can biology’s Big Data take us? “Can we model biology’s beginnings?â€
Biography
Biography: Temple F. Smith
Abstract
Modern Biology now claims to be a “big data” science. Unfortunately the term Big Data has a lot of associated hype these days. Clearly the science at the Large Hardon Collider at CERN involves big data, as does the astronomy, with Hubble’s deep field images. It is confluence of ever expanding genomic, structural and image data that supports such claims for modern biosciences. In the medical area there is a wealth of potential data in medical records and tissue samples, all have the potential for Big Data, but with many unresolved challenges. What lessons can be learned from our current attempts to exploit these data to provide insight into the fundamental questions of the earliest evolutionary events, we will review these issue.
There have been, successfully reconstructs of the Phylogeny of major animal taxonomic divisions. For example, the phylogeny of the entire class Aves or Birds (8), has just recently been published, pushing the origins of birds back. This success has rested on two things: The fact that modern biology is a “big data” science with tens of thousands of full genome DNA sequences, and on the concept that what is widely common has been conserved over long time periods. Yet even more important is our ability to extract information from those data, allowing for errors, legacy annotation, and missing data.
