Iranian Scientists Propose New Way for Optical Detection of Mutations in Sequence of DNA
“The achievements of this invention for Iran include reduction of the time to diagnose genetic diseases, including physical abnormalities and mental disabilities, cancer, allergies, and diseases of the nervous system, decreasing costs of genetic tests for the patients, reducing the time and financial costs of research and development in the field of genetic science and engineering and helping the improvement of the Iranian research and medical centers to turn into a pole,” Somayeh Koohi, an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, told ANA.
“Optical processing as a new technology can process a large amount of data in a short period of time by using data parallelization and high speed of light propagation; therefore, we used optical computers to process bioinformatics data,” she added.
Koohi said that the invention can be used in genetic, biotechnology and agricultural research centers, educational centers, including medical universities, research centers in the field of genetic medicine and genetic diseases, clinics and hospitals, pharmaceutical research companies, companies with DNA matching services, etc.
In electronic computers, extensive amount of computations required for searching biological sequences in big databases leads to vast amount of energy consumption for electrical processing and cooling.
On the other hand, optical processing is much faster than electrical counterpart, due to its parallel processing capability, at a fraction of energy consumption level and cost.
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