My post-doc is doing genomics of micro-organisms from starved cave environments. Several universities in the Kentucky area have banded together to get a sequencer which allows a small microbiology lab like ourselves to do sequencing for a few thousand dollars. The biology department here doesn’t have the dedicated computing cluster required for genomic assembly and analysis however the availability of on demand computing resources means this isn’t a problem as we can rent a virtual machine with 64GB of RAM by the hour. The only bottleneck in my project will therefore be my ability to formulate a research question and properly analyse The genomic data.
The availability of cheaper sequencing and by-the-hour computer time means that smaller research laboratories are no longer restricted in their ability to do genomics. It’s not hard to imagine a few years ago that sequencing costs put novel genomics out of reach for most labs, while only labs at large institutions had access to dedicated computing facilities. From my experience of moving from a large to small university it seems the financial and infrastructure barriers for doing genomics are now much lower. Genomics, in microbes at least, can now be carried out by hundreds of smaller labs instead of clustered at a few large sequencing centres and universities.
I remember when I started doing my masters five years ago that most papers began by discussing the "explosion of sequence data", but I think the availability of cheaper sequencing means that the explosion is just beginning. Now is a great time to be a bioinformatician – sequencing and computational power are now much easier to access and the problem will be finding people that can manage and process the data.