"We liked the shaver so much we bought the company": Federating iPlant to the UK and beyond!

After the success of iPlant collaborative project in the US, the BBSRC have funded the extension of the iPlant cyberinfrastructure across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. A collaboration between The Universities of Liverpool, Warwick, Nottingham and The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) is working towards federation of the iPlant environment onto hardware based at TGAC that will be used to facilitate big data analysis for the UK life science community. The team at iPlantUK are also working to create and implement bioinformatics workflows within the GUI based discovery environment of iPlant, driven by the needs of the UK life science community. More specifically, at Liverpool we have been working to create RNA-seq workflows incorporating the Tuxedo suite of tools for RNA differential expression analysis along with re-creating and improving mapping by sequencing workflows for analysis of Barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Hexploid wheat (Triticum aestivum) using multiple strategies in order to make often difficult to reproduce work flows available in a user friendly way in a centralised location which will encourage and facilitate reproducible and robust research. Here we will describe our current projects and outline the future direction of iPlantUK.