Construction of a Taiwan biodiversity genetic database in cloud environments

Biodiversity is commonly used to measure the degree of variation of life forms and health conditions within an area or ecosystem. However, reckless human behaviors and dramatic climate changes inevitably cause species extinction. It is therefore important and urgent to establish genetic databases worldwide for preserving precious genome sequences of diversified organisms and perhaps restoration for endangered species. To integrate such abundant genetic data, it requires a robust, stable, and secure mechanism for reliable data storage and retrieval. Here, we have constructed a Taiwan biodiversity genetic database within a cloud environment. The database contains Taiwan related gene sequences from NCBI and local researchers, and it is daily updated for data synchronization. We also collected genome data of various model species from Ensembl for cross-species comparison and functional annotation. To realize the proposed database for such extremely large amount of genome data, cloud computing techniques indeed provide an adequate solution and a mature environment for the exponentially increasing genetic sequences. Besides, important issues for constructing a biodiversity genome database such as data integrity, confidentiality efficiency, availability, and reliability are concerned and discussed in this paper.