Yabi: Experimental Design and Integrative -Omics Analysis

High throughput –omics technologies are rapidly advancing our understanding of a range of biological systems relevant to Biomedical and Agricultural Sciences.  The exponential increase in omics data is becoming a significant bottleneck at various levels. In addition many biologists may not be experienced in running Unix/Linux command line bioinformatics tools. In this case the analysis of Omics data can be a non-trivial task. We present an overview of the architecture of a software system that is adaptable to a range of execution and data environments in an open source implementation called Yabi. Yabi provides an analysis workflow environment that can create and reuse workflows for a range of applications. New tools can be easily configured and managed through a web-based environment. We have implemented and customized analysis workflows for genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, proteomics and metabolomics applications including quality assessment, quality filtering and de novo assembly. In this presentation Yabi workflows designed and implemented for genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics are described by way of example analyses. These analysis workflows highlight simplified data processing and management in a streamlined and controlled bioinformatics environment ideal for downstream comparative and statistical analysis.