bam.iobio An Online Alignment File Inspector

ABSTRACT

The analysis of big genomic data sets today engenders an all-or-nothing approach, i.e., complete, end-to-end analysis, which is time consuming and unintuitive; it also requires considerable computational expertise and costly computer infrastructure, effectively excluding many bench biologists from genome-scale analyses. We have developed and are continually expanding a web-based analysis system, iobio (http://iobio.io/), to empower all biological researchers to analyze—easily, interactively and in a visually driven manner—large biomedical data sets that are essential for their research, without onerous resource requirements. A primary example of genome-scale 'big data' is the BAM¹ format DNA sequence alignment file. BAM files underlie diverse types of genetic analyses, acting as the universal currency of high-throughput sequence analysis. Here we report the first complete iobio web app, bam.iobio (Fig. 1; http://bam.iobio.io/), an open-source dashboard web application providing an insightful overview of the contents of these large, non–human-readable BAM files and enabling users to further analyze their alignments, all in real time.