Data deluge in the life sciences The life sciences field is entering an era of big data with the breakthroughs of science and technology. Moore's law shows that computers double in speed and halve in size every 18 months (1). A similar trend is observed for hard disks (2) and networks (3). The exponential growth of scientific instruments has resulted in an exponentially growing amount of scientific data (4). Until recent years, Moore's law kept outpacing the generation of biological sequence data by its growth in storage and processing capacity. This trend has remained true for approximately 40 years and was not broken until the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. From 2005, the sequencing output doubling rate decreased to 5 months because of the development of Next-Generation Sequencing technologies (NGS) (5).