iPlantUK: Creating User Friendly RNA-Seq and Mapping by Sequencing Workflows

After the success of the 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. At Liverpool University 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 diploid plants, in this case Barley (Hordeum vulgare), using multiple strategies in order to make, what are often difficult to reproduce, workflows available in a user friendly way in a centralised location that will encourage and facilitate reproducible and robust research.