Section: New Software and Platforms
WellInverter
Keywords: Bioinformatics - Statistics - Data visualization - Data modeling
Scientific Description: WellInverter is a web application that implements linear inversion methods for the reconstruction of gene expression profiles from fluorescent or luminescent reporter gene data. WellInverter makes the methods available to a broad audience of biologists and bioinformaticians. In particular, we have put in place a parallel computing architecture with a load balancer to distribute the analysis queries over several back-end servers, redesigned the graphical user interface, and developed a plug-in system for defining high-level routines for parsing data files produced by microplate readers from different manufacturers.
Functional Description: As input, WellInverter reads the primary data file produced by a 96-well microplate reader, containing time-series measurements of the absorbance (optical density) as well as the fluorescence and luminescence intensities in each well (if available). Various modules exist to analyze the data, in particular for detecting outliers, subtracting background, estimating growth rates, promoter activities and protein concentrations, visualizing expression profiles, synchronizing replicate profiles, etc. The computational core of the web application consists of the Python library WellFARE.
News Of The Year: Deployment of WellInverter on an Inria server and on the new cloud of the French Institute for Bioinformatics (see the web page for details). Submission of a journal article describing the new version of the application.
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Participants: Delphine Ropers, Hans Geiselmann, Hidde De Jong, Johannes Geiselmann, Michel Page, Valentin Zulkower and Yannick Martin
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Publication: Robust reconstruction of gene expression profiles from reporter gene data using linear inversion