Learn from Accubits Technologies. Exploratory session on Blockchain in Bioinformatics

2. Trends: Past 5 years
An investment of $100 in Bitcoin in 2011 is now worth $482,666.67

3. Overview of Blockchain.
A Transaction in Blockchain.
High affinity of Blockchain- why?
Blockchain in Bioinformatics.
Use cases.
Structure of the session

4. Blockchain
Distributed digital ledger or database.
● Record of transactions and it can be money, good or secure data.
● Designed in a way the makes it impossible to alter.
● Every node contains a copy of all the blocks.

5. A transaction in Blockchain

6. High affinity of Blockchain- why?
Trust
Distributed
Traceability
Transparency

7. Transparency
Permissioned and permissionless blockchains.
● Permissioned Blockchain
○ Authorized access.
○ BigchainDB, Corda.
● Permissionless Blockchain
○ Open access.
○ Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

8. Distributed
● Network operates on a peer-to-peer basis.
● Avoids vulnerability of centralized computers hackers can exploit.
● Provides key players to follow better governance and compliance
regulations.

9. Trust
● Consensus algorithm provides a secure way updating the state
according to some specific transition rules.
● Popular consensus mechanisms:
○ Proof of Work (PoW)
■ Eg: Bitcoin, Ethereum
○ Proof of Stake (PoS)
■ Eg: Tezos

10. Traceability
● Blocks are added in a linear and chronological order.
● Key to a blockchain's security- Hash.
○ Hash is a unique string of characters.
○ A Hash function creates a Hash taking the block’s information.
○ Hash from one block is added to the data in the next block.
○ Creating the next block, a trace of it is woven into the new hash and
throughout the chain.

11. Blockchain in Bioinformatics
Secure and controlled access to your genomic data.
Data security is a particular challenge.
Genomic and health information is increasingly captured, stored made
available and commoditized.

12. How to share without sacrificing accessibility, control and security?
Blockchain can be used to manage genomic data which is very large.
However, blocks can only be upto 1 MB.
What can be done?
Divide personal genomic data files into Sub Units.
Encrypt and hash the Sub Units uniquely.
Store personal genome file metadata on a Blockchain.
Restore file by retrieving file metadata and decrypt to get the Sub Unit
locations.

13. Use Cases
Governance.
Supply chain auditing.
File storage.
Prediction markets.
Protection of intellectual property.

14. Thank you