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Motivation: Cell to cell communication is critical for all multicellular organisms, and single-cell sequencing facilitates the construction of full connectivity graphs between cell types in tissues. Such complex data structures demand novel analysis methods and tools for exploratory analysis., Results: We propose a method to predict the putative ligand-receptor interactions between cell types from single-cell RNA-sequencing data. This is achieved by inferring and incorporating interactions in a multi-directional graph, thereby enabling contextual exploratory analysis. We demonstrate that our approach can detect common and specific interactions between cell types in mouse brain and human tumors, and that these interactions fit with expected outcomes. These interactions also include predictions made with molecular ligands integrating information from several types of genes necessary for ligand production and transport. Our implementation is general and can be appended to any transcriptome analysis pipeline to provide unbiased hypothesis generation regarding ligand to receptor interactions between cell populations or for network analysis in silico., Availability and Implementation: scConnect is open source and available as a Python package at https://github.com/JonETJakobsson/scConnect. scConnect is directly compatible with Scanpy scRNA-sequencing pipelines., Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Motivation: Developing a robust and performant data analysis workflow that integrates all necessary components whilst still being able to scale over multiple compute nodes is a challenging task. We introduce a generic method based on the microservice architecture, where software tools are encapsulated as Docker containers that can be connected into scientific workflows and executed using the Kubernetes container orchestrator., Results: We developed a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) which facilitates rapid integration of new tools and developing scalable and interoperable workflows for performing metabolomics data analysis. The environment can be launched on-demand on cloud resources and desktop computers. IT-expertise requirements on the user side are kept to a minimum, and workflows can be re-used effortlessly by any novice user. We validate our method in the field of metabolomics on two mass spectrometry, one nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and one fluxomics study. We showed that the method scales dynamically with increasing availability of computational resources. We demonstrated that the method facilitates interoperability using integration of the major software suites resulting in a turn-key workflow encompassing all steps for mass-spectrometry-based metabolomics including preprocessing, statistics and identification. Microservices is a generic methodology that can serve any scientific discipline and opens up for new types of large-scale integrative science., Availability and Implementation: The PhenoMeNal consortium maintains a web portal (https://portal.phenomenal-h2020.eu) providing a GUI for launching the Virtual Research Environment. The GitHub repository https://github.com/phnmnl/ hosts the source code of all projects., Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online., (© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Motivation: Computational biologists face many challenges related to data size, and they need to manage complicated analyses often including multiple stages and multiple tools, all of which must be deployed to modern infrastructures. To address these challenges and maintain reproducibility of results, researchers need (i) a reliable way to run processing stages in any computational environment, (ii) a well-defined way to orchestrate those processing stages and (iii) a data management layer that tracks data as it moves through the processing pipeline., Results: Pachyderm is an open-source workflow system and data management framework that fulfils these needs by creating a data pipelining and data versioning layer on top of projects from the container ecosystem, having Kubernetes as the backbone for container orchestration. We adapted Pachyderm and demonstrated its attractive properties in bioinformatics. A Helm Chart was created so that researchers can use Pachyderm in multiple scenarios. The Pachyderm File System was extended to support block storage. A wrapper for initiating Pachyderm on cloud-agnostic virtual infrastructures was created. The benefits of Pachyderm are illustrated via a large metabolomics workflow, demonstrating that Pachyderm enables efficient and sustainable data science workflows while maintaining reproducibility and scalability., Availability and Implementation: Pachyderm is available from https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm. The Pachyderm Helm Chart is available from https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable/pachyderm. Pachyderm is available out-of-the-box from the PhenoMeNal VRE (https://github.com/phnmnl/KubeNow-plugin) and general Kubernetes environments instantiated via KubeNow. The code of the workflow used for the analysis is available on GitHub (https://github.com/pharmbio/LC-MS-Pachyderm)., Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online., (© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Summary: The previously disclosed QuantMap method for grouping chemicals by biological activity used online services for much of the data gathering and some of the numerical analysis. The present work attempts to streamline this process by using local copies of the databases and in-house analysis. Using computational methods similar or identical to those used in the previous work, a qualitatively equivalent result was found in just a few seconds on the same dataset (collection of 18 drugs). We use the user-friendly Galaxy framework to enable users to analyze their own datasets. Hopefully, this will make the QuantMap method more practical and accessible and help achieve its goals to provide substantial assistance to drug repositioning, pharmacology evaluation and toxicology risk assessment., Availability: http://galaxy.predpharmtox.org, Contact: mats.gustafsson@medsci.uu.se or ola.spjuth@farmbio.uu.se, Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Summary: In this work we present WhichCyp, a tool for prediction of which cytochromes P450 isoforms (among 1A2, 2C9, 2C19, 2D6 and 3A4) a given molecule is likely to inhibit. The models are built from experimental high-throughput data using support vector machines and molecular signatures., Availability: The WhichCyp server is freely available for use on the web at http://drug.ku.dk/whichcyp, where the WhichCyp Java program and source code is also available for download.

Summary: Bioclipse, a graphical workbench for the life sciences, provides functionality for managing and visualizing life science data. We introduce Bioclipse-R, which integrates Bioclipse and the statistical programming language R. The synergy between Bioclipse and R is demonstrated by the construction of a decision support system for anticancer drug screening and mutagenicity prediction, which shows how Bioclipse-R can be used to perform complex tasks from within a single software system., Availability and Implementation: Bioclipse-R is implemented as a set of Java plug-ins for Bioclipse based on the R-package rj. Source code and binary packages are available from https://github.com/bioclipse and http://www.bioclipse.net/bioclipse-r, respectively., Contact: martin.eklund@farmbio.uu.se, Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Summary: The HIV Drug Research Centre (HIVDRC) has established Web services for prediction of drug susceptibility for HIV proteases and reverse transcriptases. The services are based on two proteochemometric models which accepts a protease or reverse transcriptase sequence in amino acid form, and outputs the predicted drug susceptibility values. The predictions are based on a comprehensive analysis where all the relevant inhibitors are included, resulting in models with excellent predictive capabilities., Availability and Implementation: The services are implemented as interoperable Web services (REST and XMPP), with supporting web pages to allow for individual analyses. A set of plugins were also developed which make the services available from the Bioclipse workbench for life science. Services are available at http://www.hivdrc.org/services.

Unlabelled: The Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics Data Warehouse (LCB-DWH) is a web-based infrastructure for reliable and secure microarray gene expression data management and analysis that provides an online service for the scientific community. The LCB-DWH is an effort towards a complete system for storage (using the BASE system), analysis and publication of microarray data. Important features of the system include: access to established methods within R/Bioconductor for data analysis, built-in connection to the Gene Ontology database and a scripting facility for automatic recording and re-play of all the steps of the analysis. The service is up and running on a high performance server. At present there are more than 150 registered users., Availability: An open functional version is available at https://dw.lcb.uu.se/index.phtml?i_login=test. User accounts are created upon request. Additional facilities including plug-ins, user documentation and a password protected data storage system are available from http://www.lcb.uu.se/lcbdw.php