Malva search engine enables rapid RNA sequence discovery

Scientists at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin have developed Malva, a new search engine designed to locate specific RNA sequences across millions of cells in seconds. Published in the journal Nature, the tool aims to accelerate scientific and medical research by addressing the data bottleneck in cellular biology.

Traditional methods often convert sequences into gene counts by comparing them to a reference genome, a process that can hide rare variants, mutations, or sequences that do not match the reference. Malva bypasses this limitation by allowing researchers to search directly for nucleotide sequences within original datasets. This approach avoids the need for laboratories to download and reprocess petabytes of data, which is often computationally unfeasible.