China on Thursday will launch operations at its first national gene bank in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, which is expected to develop into the largest biological information center in the country and even the world.
The national gene bank is "projected to be the world's largest comprehensive gene bank," boasting the world's largest storage capacity and most accessible data and samples, the public relations department of Chinese gene research giant BGI told the Global Times on Tuesday in a statement.
"We hope to build it into China's and even the world's largest bio data center, or the Google of the field of life science data," Xu Xun, director of BGI Research and executive director of CNGB, was quoted by the Nanfang Daily's WeChat public account as saying on September 7.
Approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2011, the facility is dedicated to storing and managing the country's unique genetic resources and data, the Xinhua News Agency reported on June 19.
The first phase of the center's construction covers an area of 47,500 square meters, including a 25,500 square meter gene database and a 22,000 square meter biological specimen bank, according to the statement.
BGI is also preparing to build an underground specimen bank that, when finished, will become the first underground gene sample storage center on the planet and will serve as a permanent storage center for the world's core genetic resources.
The statement also claims that the bank will become a fundamental support platform for the storage, reading, decoding, editing and application of genes. The findings will have an impact on several fields, primarily including biomedicine, agriculture, microbiology and marine biology.
The gene bank currently has a collection of 10 million biological samples and a data storage capability of 60 petabytes, which is ultimately expected to reach 500 petabytes.
The gene bank has built strategic partnerships with over 100 research institutes both at home and abroad, including the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and Norway-based Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
The national gene bank began trial operations on June 18, and the project is expected to boost research and economic growth in the fields of health, agriculture, biodiversity and environmental protection, said Xinhua.
Before the establishment of China's national gene bank, the DNA Data Bank of Japan, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and GenBank at the US National Center for Biotechnology Information were considered to be the world's three major genetic sequence databases. The newly opened Chinese gene bank will now be able to exchange data with these authoritative databases on a daily basis.