Typical genomic analyses are too slow. You transport DNA samples from the collection point to a centralized facility to be sequenced and analyzed in a batch process, which can take weeks or even months. Recently, nanopore DNA sequencers have become commercially available that stream raw signal-level data as they are collected and provide immediate access to them. However, processing the data in real-time remains challenging, requiring substantial compute and storage resources, as well as a dedicated bioinformatician. Not only is the process still too slow, it’s also failure-prone, expensive, and doesn’t scale.

We recently built out a proof of concept for genomics researchers and bioinformatics developers that highlights the breadth and depth of Google Cloud’s data processing tools. In this presentation we describe a scalable, reliable, and cost effective end-to-end pipeline for fast DNA sequence analysis built on Google Cloud and this new class of nanopore DNA sequencers.