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A Korean research team has successfully developed a technology to diagnose genes using genetic data. The technique is expected to be widely utilized in the diagnosis of new kinds of virus and cancer, and the detection of genetically-modified organisms.
A joint research team headed by Kim Min-soo, professor of the department of Information and Communication Engineering, and Koo Jae-hyung, professor of the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) announced on June 29 that they succeeded in developing MRPrimer, a MapReduce-based method capable of diagnosing genes based on genetic data analysis.
The newly-developed technique is the world's first ultra high-performance method that can automatically discover valid primer pairs in a DNA database at once by entering tens of thousands of pieces of genetic data of the entire species rather than individual target genes. It is more advanced than the existing method that removes primers that are irrelevant to target genes by entering each primer.
The research findings were first published online on June 24 by Nucleic Acids Research, a scientific journal published by Oxford University Press.