On the exploitation of cloud computing in bioinformatics

Life sciences make heavily use of the web for proving data and analysis tools. There are more than one thousand molecular biology databases characterized by their complexity and higher level of interdependence. Cloud computing has been successfully applied in many fields where managing the data is the major hurdle. It offers an abstraction layer that enables an integrated access to processing, storing and virtualization. In this paper we review the current organization of molecular biology databases and the main technologies for cloud computing. Finally we discuss the main opportunities and challenges of applying bioinformatics to cloud computing.