CRM students Florian Halbritter and Harsh Vaidya have produced a user-friendly data analysis softwaresystem which streamlines best-practice procedures and makes it possible for researchers with different levels of experience to rapidly analyse their primary data.

The software program, called GeneProf, also aims to speed up research progress by making completed analyses along with the input data and results transparently and reproducibly available to other scientists and the public.

Florian Halbritter said: "Modern functional genomics technologies produce vast amounts of complex data. The processing of all these data now often becomes the bottleneck of biological experiments. The new generation of high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing platforms has made it even worse."

He continued: "We know many research laboratories simply lack the computing infrastructure and, crucially, the expertise to analyse the latest findings efficiently. GeneProf will hopefully make life easier for scientists working with large datasets".

CRM researcher Dr Simon Tomlinson, who led the development, added: "GeneProf supports start-to-finish analysis of RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data covering all essential processing requirements including quality control, read alignment, signal quantification and comparison, detection of enriched binding events and functional association with targets and automatically supplements many aspects of the analysis with informative plots and summaries. This makes it a very powerful tool for researchers."

More information can be found in the January 2012 issue of Nature Methods or on the program's website www.geneprof.org. The project was funded by the European consortium EuroSyStem and the Medical Research Council.

Screenshot of the GeneProf website. The primary interface is completely web-based: no need to install any special software, it can be used right away. Browse hundreds of publicly available datasets or start analysing data.