I’ll be presenting my final MSc project at the next Biogeeks meeting, taking place on the 21st October, at Imperial College.

Title:

AQuA-NGS: A Quality Assessment Tool for Next Generation Sequencing Data

Abstract:

Background
The recent advancement of high-throughput sequencing enables the experimentalist to generate huge amounts of data at the genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic levels. However, as this is a relatively new technology, the methods for assessing the quality of the data are still limited.

Results
The AQuA-NGS system was developed as a platform-independent, desktop application for the viewing of quality assessment metrics generated by the R/Bioconductor package, ShortRead. These metrics are stored in a MySQL database, together with run and sample metadata. Using the flash-based GUI, the Bioinformatician may submit new data, browse the database, view metrics via interactive tables and charts, and directly compare QA metrics across samples, on the basis of multiple criteria.

Conclusions
The system in its present, foundational state can perform the basic functions of generating, viewing, and comparing a limited set of QA metrics generated from Illumina/Solexa export files. It requires additional development to make it ready for public release, such as the ability to process non-Solexa files, and work with remote destinations. Once complete, it will hopefully be incorporated into the pre-processing pipeline of multiple next generation sequencing platforms.

Click for more details on the location and other speakers.