Alexander Kanitz | PubMed Health

PubMed2026

Managing workflow executions with WESkit.

SUMMARY: In biomedical research, managing computational workflows across numerous projects-with varying parameters, tools, and environments-creates major challenges in scalability, reproducibility, and collaboration. Here, we present WESkit, an implementation of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Workflow Execution Service (WES) interface, designed to streamline the execution, monitoring, and documentation of data processing workflows. It addresses the complexities involved in managing numerous executions with varying parameters across diverse research projects. Supporting both Snakemake and Nextflow, the system enables consistent automation and centralized monitoring, which benefits research groups aiming for long-term reproducibility and scalable collaboration. Its suitability for larger teams and service units is further enhanced by seamless integration into cloud environments, contributing to the GA4GH cloud framework. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The software WESkit is available under MIT license at the GitLab repository (https://gitlab.com/one-touch-pipeline/weskit). The WESkit main repository is archived at Software Heritage (https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https://gitlab.com/one-touch-pipeline/weskit/api.git) and can be found using "one-touch-pipeline/weskit" term in the search section.

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PubMed2025

HTSinfer: inferring metadata from bulk Illumina RNA-Seq libraries.

SUMMARY: The Sequencing Read Archive is one of the largest and fastest-growing repositories of sequencing data, containing tens of petabytes of sequenced reads. Its data is used by a wide scientific community, often beyond the primary study that generated them. Such analyses rely on accurate metadata concerning the type of experiment and library, as well as the organism from which the sequenced reads were derived. These metadata are typically entered manually by contributors in an error-prone process, and are frequently incomplete. In addition, easy-to-use computational tools that verify the consistency and completeness of metadata describing the libraries to facilitate data reuse, are largely unavailable. Here, we introduce HTSinfer, a Python-based tool to infer metadata directly and solely from bulk RNA-sequencing data generated on Illumina platforms. HTSinfer leverages genome sequence information and diagnostic genes to rapidly and accurately infer the library source and library type, as well as the relative read orientation, 3' adapter sequence and read length statistics. HTSinfer is written in a modular manner, published under a permissible free and open-source license and encourages contributions by the community, enabling easy addition of new functionalities, e.g. for the inference of additional metrics, or the support of different experiment types or sequencing platforms. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: HTSinfer is released under the Apache License 2.0. Latest code is available via GitHub at https://github.com/zavolanlab/htsinfer, while releases are published on Bioconda. A snapshot of the HTSinfer version described in this article was deposited at Zenodo at 10.5281/zenodo.13985958.

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