IDIES would like to congratulate Ben Langmead for his recent award, funded by the National Institute of Health. IDIES seed funding enabled Ben’s team to develop Rail-RNA, a software tool that enables scientists, including those with limited computational resources and expertise, to execute a uniform, splicing-aware, annotation-agnostic analysis of many RNA sequencing datasets. This software effort was the basis for several follow-on projects. In one project, the team developed a version of Rail-RNA and a separate “protocol” for allowing researchers to analyze privacy-protected genomic data on the Amazon Elastic MapReduce cloud computing service. In another project, the team ran the Rail-RNA software on a huge collection of public data: around 50,000 human RNA sequencing samples, consisting of about 150 trillion nucleotides of data, from the Sequence Read Archive.
“We compiled all the evidence for gene splicing events into a raw resource called Intropolis,” said Dr. Langmead, “which we used to demonstrate the extent of unannotated splicing events (i.e. events not included in well accepted, curated lists). We are also working to make this data readily available and queryable via the SciServer resource at IDIES. The PI prepared and was awarded an NIH/NIGMS R01 grant that will fund future development of the software.”
If you would like to read more information on the project, please follow this link.
