  Bioinformatics research is characterized by voluminous and incremental
datasets and complex data analytics methods. The machine learning methods used
in bioinformatics are iterative and parallel. These methods can be scaled to
handle big data using the distributed and parallel computing technologies.
  Usually big data tools perform computation in batch-mode and are not
optimized for iterative processing and high data dependency among operations.
In the recent years, parallel, incremental, and multi-view machine learning
algorithms have been proposed. Similarly, graph-based architectures and
in-memory big data tools have been developed to minimize I/O cost and optimize
iterative processing.
  However, there lack standard big data architectures and tools for many
important bioinformatics problems, such as fast construction of co-expression
and regulatory networks and salient module identification, detection of
complexes over growing protein-protein interaction data, fast analysis of
massive DNA, RNA, and protein sequence data, and fast querying on incremental
and heterogeneous disease networks. This paper addresses the issues and
challenges posed by several big data problems in bioinformatics, and gives an
overview of the state of the art and the future research opportunities.
