Towards Indonesian genbank: A framework for repository and discovery for nucleotide sequences in Indonesia

Biodiversity is an important factor in research, particularly in basic biology, agriculture, and health. Meanwhile, Indonesia is classified as a mega-biodiversity hot spot. Unfortunately, until now, Indonesia’s rich biodiversity has not been utilized well, especially in terms of nucleotide sequences. In fact, the nucleotide sequence is the most fundamental level of a gene or genome to understand the genetic function or evolution. Further analysis of the nucleotide sequence provides more information for the knowledge disclosure on biodiversity which can be a basis of biological sciences to reveal the hidden potential of biodiversity, to obtain superior genetic resources of plant breeding, to improve food technology, or to integrate the medical history, clinical knowledge, and genetic information towards precision medicine. As far as is known, there are no public or private repositories or platforms to help Indonesian researchers or scientists to learn more about Indonesian’s biodiversity. If there is, most of them tend to be sporadic, not yet integrated, and not following the standard ontology metadata. In addition, only recently, our government launched the national integrated biomedical initiative for precision medicine. However, precision medicine is strongly related to biodiversity utilization which needs large-scale data. Therefore, an integrated framework for repository and discovery analysis of nucleotide sequences in Indonesia is needed to assist the development of knowledge not only in the field of precision medicine but also in life sciences, food, and others. In this study, we proposed the development of Indonesian Genbank, namely the Indonesian National Nucleotide Archive (INNA), which is an integrated knowledge-based approach to provide storage, computation nodes, and data server for data sequencing and analysis in the field of life science, food, and health, that will be utilized using the computational infrastructure such as high-performance computing (HPC) in the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) with the hope it can be globally accepted as a computing resource and user.