EasyBio: A Bioinformatics Web Platform to Analyze Families of Genes

AGOSTINI F.; HERNANDEZ, PILAR; GALVEZ ROJAS S.

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

Año: 2021 vol. 1330 p. 210 - 219

2194-5357

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques have facilitated genome sequencing in a cost-effective way and have impacted the work of geneticists and bioinformaticians. In particular, the study of gene families and transcription factors in plants is among the fields affected by this revolution, and remains a task involving many manual steps and the use of differently located computing resources. From a Bioinformatics point of view, the first steps to take in these studies are well-defined and imply the management of a complex set of computer tools difficult to install and setup. We introduce EasyBio, a web platform whose aim is to strengthen the field of Bioinformatics providing user-friendly tools to biologists and allowing them to focus on the biological meanings of the results instead of applying efforts to the computing technical aspects. EasyBio facilitates the user to interact with one of the main databases of plants, EnsemblPlants, to retrieve gene data and to incorporate it into an easy to use pipeline of tools. At the same time, EasyBio is versatile enough to allow a wide range of customization and output possibilities, displaying results in real time and interactively. The user does not need to learn about complex procedures, purely technical, or to deal with involute command line consoles. A clear web interface, a good user experience (with high quality results) and a good design of the backend are at the heart of this web platform. EasyBio is also free-to-use.