Advances in high throughput sequencing have increased the need for tools that aid in data storage,
analysis, annotation, and visualization. Many such tools are available, but their usability and
accessibility vary. To make essential tools more accessible, the bioinformatics community has
coalesced around the idea of using cloud-based platforms to provide access to computational power
and data storage resources. CyVerse is a multi-institution project focused on supporting life science
research by providing user-friendly access to national cyberinfrastructure resources, including HPC
clusters and storage infrastructure. As part of this effort, CyVerse developers built the Terrain
Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), which offer programmatic access to these resources.
One important limitation of the CyVerse ecosystem, however, is that there is currently no easy way
for researchers to visualize genomic data sets stored in CyVerse accounts. This is problematic
because visualization is essential for all aspects of data analysis, from validating the output of
algorithms to detecting biologically meaningful patterns in data.
BioViz Connect solves this problem by connecting CyVerse resources to Integrated Genome
Browser, a full-featured, open source, visualization tool for genomics used by thousands of
researchers worldwide. BioViz Connect uses Terrain APIs to forward data from CyVerse into IGB.
The BioViz Connect interface (Figure 1) lets users annotate data files with key meta-data, notably
the version of reference genomes used in data analysis. Users can also run compute-intensive visual
analytics tasks and then display the results in IGB. To our knowledge, no other group has yet
experimented with using Terrain for application development outside of the CyVerse team.
