Yabi: A Web-based Bioinformatics Analytical Platform for 'Omics Research

Bioinformatics workflow environments must be user-friendly, highly customizable, leverage transparently local, national and/or cloud supercomputing infrastructure automatically without end-user intervention. Yabi is a web-based analytical environment that can be customized for a diverse range of -omics applications including genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, proteomics and/or metabolomics. Yabi primariliy enables seamless and transparent access to heterogenous HPC and cloud resources and then builds an analysis workflow environment that can create and reuse workflows. Yabi is able to manage large amounts of both raw and processed data in a secure and flexible way across geographically distributed compute resources. Users are able to either use the web-based environment to drag-and-drop tools to create sophisticated workflows or alternatively use the yabi-command-line, which is designed for users more comfortable writing scripts or for configuring external workflow environments. Yabi greatly simplifies the task of configuring tools by enabling system administrators to configure as well as manage running tools via a web-based environment and without the need to write/edit software programs/scripts. In the Yabi web-based analytical environment framework bioinformatics workflows have been developed that simplify NGS data processing for bacterial genomics, complex eukaryotic genome assembly/annotation (e.g. wheat, cattle tick), personalized medicine and metagenomics applications. Yabi may be found at: http://ccg.murdoch.edu.au/yabi/.