From the Universe to Life: Why Sequencing Throughput Must Continuously Improve
Have you ever wondered why we need to constantly improve sequencing throughput? Consider the sheer amount of data every living body contains. By looking at the development of astronomy, we can gain new perspectives on this challenge.
Exploring the Universe: A Century of Astronomy
During the Age of Enlightenment, when Newton lived, humans observed new phenomena with new tools and methods, establishing new theories and reshaping how we produce, live, and interact with our environment.
Today, scientific tools are advancing at an unprecedented speed. In both time-space exploration and life sciences, big data has become essential. We can no longer rely on small-scale observations alone. Accurate observation now requires capturing vast datasets to uncover new insights.
Human curiosity—“Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?”—has driven this progress. New methods and instruments allow observation of previously unseen phenomena, generating new concepts, theories, and applications. These phenomena exist not only in the vast universe but also within life itself.
The History of Astronomical Observation
From ancient times to the 16th century, humans observed the sky using instruments like celestial tools and telescopes. China’s Gander-Shi Shenxing Table recorded 121 stars, and the Xiqipas star catalogue recorded 1,022 stars. Galileo’s telescope and the heliocentric model revolutionised observation. By inspiring figures like Kepler and Newton, astronomy developed laws of planetary motion and universal gravitation.
Between 1609 and 1619, theoretical calculations and observations revealed new celestial bodies, including Halley’s comet, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. By 1785, Herschel used over 1,000 telescope observations to model the first galaxy. From the 10th to 20th century, polarizing photometers, spectrometers, and photography enabled large-scale stellar analysis, leading to the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, nebular observations, and cosmological models, including the Big Bang theory.
Modern astronomy relies on massive instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gravitational Wave Detector, and ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder). These generate enormous datasets—ASKAP produces 2.5 GB per second or 100 PB per year. The “Sky Eye” telescope in China reaches 38 GB per second with 100 PB of storage capacity. Big data is now real-time, panoramic, and multi-dimensional. On 17 August 2017, humans observed a neutron star merger via a global network of 70 observatories and over 100 instruments, marking the era of multi-messenger astronomy.
Back to Life: Every Human Body is a Small Universe
Just as the universe generates massive data, the human body is equally complex. With approximately 1014 cells—more than the number of nebulae in the universe—each day sees billions of cells born and dying. Every cell contains a genome of 6 billion bases, encoding around 25,000 genes. Each genome can undergo modifications, mutations, or foreign gene invasions, interacting dynamically with the body and environment. Add to this the genomic contributions of trillions of microorganisms, and the scale of biological data becomes staggering.
Describing the detailed state of human life requires Gb (~109), Tb (~1012), and even Pb (~1015) of data per individual. Large-scale studies of millions of people reach data levels in the Exabyte (~1018), Zettabyte (~1021), or Yottabyte (~1024) range.
Genomics and the Need for High Throughput
From the Human Genome Project, which cost $3 billion and took 13 years, to the Thousand Genomes Project and modern national genome initiatives, the growth of sequencing data has been explosive, doubling every seven months between 2008 and 2016—outpacing Moore’s Law. The DNBSEQ-T7 sequencer by MGI, for example, reduces sequencing costs to roughly $5 per mega-sequence, demonstrating how higher throughput drives feasibility and affordability.
High-throughput, accurate, and cost-effective sequencing platforms are essential for large population studies, precision medicine, and translational applications. Only with sufficient data can we decode life’s complexity and apply genetic insights to improve health worldwide.
From the Universe to Life
The history of astronomy mirrors life sciences: progress depends on better tools, higher data throughput, and continuous innovation. Just as humans have mapped the stars, we are now mapping the “small universe” within each human body, using big data to understand the laws of life and move closer to the truth.
