Ultima Genomics is collaborating with Nvidia to enable pangenome-aware whole genome sequencing analysis practical for large-scale whole-genome sequencing (WGS) programs including population studies, biobanks, and precision medicine initiatives.
Under the collaboration, announced Sept. 9, Ultima and Nvidia will jointly benchmark and validate pangenome-aware workflows using genetically diverse human genomes, comparing pangenome graph alignment approaches against traditional linear-reference pipelines.
The teams are evaluating workflows built on resources from the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium and Google DeepVariant’s published best practices for pangenome-aware variant calling. Pangenome-based analysis treats the genome as a series of linked features to be identified, rather than a linear sequence of letters and helps capture a broader range of human genetic diversity.
“Pangenomes are a critical next step for capturing global human genetic diversity and improving the accuracy of genomic analysis,” Ultima CEO and Cofounder Gilad Almogy said in a statement. The collaboration will allow Ultima to “move these methods from research concepts into capabilities that can be operationally deployed to support large-scale efforts.”
Ultima said it is also working with partners on infrastructure and system design for cost-effective pangenome and WGS analysis, combining on-board CPU processing with Nvidia-accelerated computing to improve efficiency. Nvidia’s Parabricks platform provides GPU-accelerated versions of the Giraffe aligner and DeepVariant to support population-scale sequencing workloads.
“New pangenome methods dramatically improve the accuracy of genomic analyses,” Andrew Carroll of Google Research said in a statement. “By combining Google’s open source methods to detect genetic variants with the unparalleled scale of Ultima sequencing and the speed of Nvidia, the genomics community can start a flywheel where new datasets further improve diagnostics and drug discovery and create tools and analysis standards openly available to the broader science community.”