S59: Archetype, the next generation in sequence analysis and design software

In the last few years sequencing technology has made the generation of large quantities of biological sequence data very affordable, but there has been no comparable increase in the ability to mine useful data from it.  As sequencing has become an assay the only limitations appear to be ones imagination as to how best to use this resource and how to deal and make sense of the resulting data deluge in a quick and user friendly manner.

In this talk examples will be given of innovative uses of high throughput sequencing technology to advance biological understanding as well as a description of our novel bioinformatics analysis platform Archetype.  Archetype is a web service and software framework developed to manage the analysis of large quantities of metagenomic, microbial and eukaryotic biological sequence data.  It has been developed over the last 4 years to meet the demands of a common analysis workflow carried out by scientists when working with biological sequence data.  The workflow involves being able to rapidly query across disparate sequence based datasets, identify potential query hits and rapidly gather sequences for further analysis.  All of these services can be exposed to an unlimited user group through an intuitive browser based user interface.