Bioinformatics Platform

Objective

The BioDec bioinformatic computing platform (BioInfo Platform - BIP) is a set of programs to build a computing cluster for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and bioinformatics. Modern NGS techniques allow to accumulate a large amount of genomic, proteomic and genetical data easily and at low costs: this amount of data allows researchers to performing analyses and simulations otherwise impossible, and therefore having results and findings of great value for drug design, vaccines research and medical diagnostics and therapy (in particular the growing field of gene therapy).

The LTSAR System

The BIP uses a BioDec proprietary meta-package manager for the storage and reproduction of bioinformatics software and NGS applications. It is called the LTSAR system (Long-Term Software Archive and Reproduction System) and it allows us to reproduce the exact software pipelines that were used years before. The typical use case is to create an environment with software that was in production years before, but that now refers to packages, or libraries, that are not even available on the Internet anymore.