Abstract

Setting up a scalable Bioinformatics Infrastructure for high-throughput biology

Sven Nahnsen, Head, University of Tuebingen

High-throughput biology in the medical context aims at developing predictive models for disease development and therapy outcome. OMICS technologies and especially next-generation sequencing are becoming increasingly popular for the acquisition of adequate system-wide data. Such experiments need to involve stringent modelling of experiments and bioinformatics workflows to reach comprehensive metadata annotation and to enable automated processing and analyses. We will present are latest developments towards the integrative analysis of large and complex NGS-based data; these include the integration of data and project management with state-of-the-art bioinformatics pipelines, as well as a production-scale hard- and software stake. Our integrated technology builds on Liferay as a portlet container and gUSE/WS-PGRADE as a workflow engine and finally on openBIS for data management application. The infrastructure is embedded in a multi-center environment and allows for distributed data acquisition and management. The modular nature of our software architecture allows for rapid extension of the functionality, such as novel pipelines are visualisation tools for NGS data.