Towards a Web-Based, Big Data, Genomics Ecosystem

Abstract

Rapid advances in genome sequencing enable a wide range of biological experiments on a scale that was until recently restricted to large genome centers. However, the analysis of the resulting vast genomic datasets is time-consuming, unintuitive and requires considerable computational expertise and costly infrastructure. Collectively, these factors effectively exclude many bench biologists from genome-scale analyses. Web-based visualization and analysis libraries, frameworks, and applications were developed to empower all biological researchers to easily, interactively, and in a visually driven manner, analyze large biomedical datasets that are essential for their research, without bioinformatics expertise and costly hardware.