Hello,

I am a scientist and some of the work I do involves next-generation sequencing data.

The way this data is generated is that short pieces of sequence 'reads' of about 100 bases (letters) are generated in a massively parallel way and then aligned (matched) to a reference genome. The human genome, for example, is about 3 billion bases long. This is, of course, a computationally intensive process and is usually carried out on a cluster or in the cloud.

What I was wondering, is whether this process could be carreid out using an ASIC miner (probably a scrypt ASIC). The tools usually used for alignments include BWA (http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/bwa.shtml) and Stampy (http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/project-stampy) in case anyone is interested in answering this question. By way of incentive, this is a multi-billion$ industry...

*waits for sequence to align for the next few weeks*