Being the Pioneer of Life Sciences in China: —Introduction to Beijing Genomics Institute

Zhang, Xin

On the construction of BGI, we have followed the strategy of “Advance through projects”, brought forward the developing strategy of constructing technique platform on the basis of large-scale genome sequencing, and successfully built up a first-class research center and mass production basement for genomics and bioinformatics, integrating modern biological technique platforms, automated equipment, industrial management, high-performance computing and data processing ability, as well as excellent teamwork. At present the high-throughput and low-cost platform of sequencing is capable of completing 100,000 reactions (50 Mb) per day by using 117 sequencers. The platform of bioinformatics has super servers including Dawning 2000, 3000, Sun 10000, and IBM P960, SGI, with 286 CPUs, 721 G memory, 75 T hard disk, and 1,135 G flopf linkpack.