A Biologist-Oriented Sequencing Data Analytic Platform for Easy Collaboration and Data Sharing

The rapid decrease in cost for high throughput sequencing has accelerated its adoption by a broad group of basic and clinical researchers. A wide variety of effective open-source tools have been created to meet the growing “Big Data” challenge, yet most of these methods assume at least some bioinformatics expertise and familiarity with UNIX environments. As a result, biologists must often recruit or rely on external expertise from a limited pool of available bioinformaticians, creating a significant hurdle to achieving timely data analysis goals.

To address this problem, we have developed a user-friendly analytic platform for sequencing data that is accessible to researchers without a bioinformatics background. Studies requiring multi-step processing such as RNA-seq, SNP variant detection, ChIP-seq analysis, de novo genome assembly, and other methods can be conducted seamlessly within the platform, utilizing peer-reviewed open-source algorithms and applications. In addition to visualizing analytic results in private UCSC genome browsers, scientists can search for and import public datasets from resources for further exploration in the context of their own data. Users are also able to share data and results across labs and institutions within a secure environment, or distribute their data to broader communities. To stay current with advances in areas of interest, researchers can also choose to receive automatic alerts of new research data and relevant publications. By supporting any plant, metazoan, or microbial genome of interest, our platform provides maximum flexibility to researchers to make breakthrough discoveries in drug development, targeted therapies, personalized medicine, biofuels, and basic research.