AsianScientist (Mar. 13, 2014) – ZENBU, a free bioinformatics tool developed at the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technology in Japan, enables researchers to quickly and easily integrate, visualize and compare large amounts of genomic information resulting from large next-generation sequencing datasets.
In a report published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Jessica Severin and colleagues explain how ZENBU works. The key difference between ZENBU and previous tools, they say, is the ability to dynamically combine thousands of experimental datasets in an interactive visualization environment through linked genome location and expression signal views.
Using ZENBU, scientists can compare their own experiments against the over 6,000 ENCODE and FANTOM consortium datasets of any kind (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq or CAGE), hence its name: Zenbu means ‘all’ or ‘everything’ in Japanese.
The software is freely available for use on the web and for installation in individual laboratories, and all ZENBU sites are connected and continuously share data. The tool can be accessed or downloaded here.
“By distributing the data and servers we encourage scientists to load and share their published data to help build a comprehensive resource to further advance research efforts and collaborations around the world,” explain the authors.
The article can be found at: Severin et al. (2014) Interactive visualization and analysis of large-scale sequencing datasets using ZENBU
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Source: RIKEN.
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