Background: Sorted merging of genomic data is a common data operation necessary in many sequencing-based studies. It involves sorting and merging genomic data from different subjects by their genomic locations. In particular, merging a large number of variant call format (VCF) files is frequently required in large-scale whole-genome sequencing or whole-exome sequencing projects. Traditional single-machine based methods become increasingly inefficient when processing large numbers of files due to the excessive computation time and Input/Output bottleneck. Distributed systems and more recent cloud-based systems offer an attractive solution. However, carefully designed and optimized workflow patterns and execution plans (schemas) are required to take full advantage of the increased computing power while overcoming bottlenecks to achieve high performance. Findings: In this study, we custom-design optimized schemas for three Apache big data platforms, Hadoop (MapReduce), HBase, and Spark, to perform sorted merging of a large number of VCF files. These schemas all adopt the divide-and-conquer strategy to split the merging job into sequential phases/stages consisting of subtasks that are conquered in an ordered, parallel, and bottleneck-free way. In two illustrating examples, we test the performance of our schemas on merging multiple VCF files into either a single TPED or a single VCF file, which are benchmarked with the traditional single/parallel multiway-merge methods, message passing interface (MPI)-based high-performance computing (HPC) implementation, and the popular VCFTools. Conclusions: Our experiments suggest all three schemas either deliver a significant improvement in efficiency or render much better strong and weak scalabilities over traditional methods. Our findings provide generalized scalable schemas for performing sorted merging on genetics and genomics data using these Apache distributed systems.

DNA strand displacement has been widely used for the design of molecular circuits, motors, and sensors in cell-free settings. Recently, it has been shown that this technology can also operate in biological environments, but capabilities remain limited. Here, we look to adapt strand displacement and exchange reactions to mammalian cells and report DNA circuitry that can directly interact with a native mRNA. We began by optimizing the cellular performance of fluorescent reporters based on four-way strand exchange reactions and identified robust design principles by systematically varying the molecular structure, chemistry and delivery method. Next, we developed and tested AND and OR logic gates based on four-way strand exchange, demonstrating the feasibility of multi-input logic. Finally, we established that functional siRNA could be activated through strand exchange, and used native mRNA as programmable scaffolds for co-localizing gates and visualizing their operation with subcellular resolution.