RESEARCH ARTICLE Genomics Virtual Laboratory: A Practical Bioinformatics Workbench for the Cloud

Background Analyzing high throughput genomics data is a complex and compute intensive task, gener-ally requiring numerous software tools and large reference data sets, tied together in suc-cessive stages of data transformation and visualisation. A computational platform enabling best practice genomics analysis ideally meets a number of requirements, including: a wide range of analysis and visualisation tools, closely linked to large user and reference data sets; workflow platform(s) enabling accessible, reproducible, portable analyses, through a flexible set of interfaces; highly available, scalable computational resources; and flexibility and versatility in the use of these resources to meet demands and expertise of a variety of users. Access to an appropriate computational platform can be a significant barrier to researchers, as establishing such a platform requires a large upfront investment in hard-ware, experience, and expertise. Results We designed and implemented the Genomics Virtual Laboratory (GVL) as a middlewar