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What is BioCompute?

Tremendous insights can be found in genome data, and many of these insights are being used to drive personalized medicine. But the hundreds of millions of reads that come from a gene sequencer represent small, nearly random fragments of the genome that’s being sequenced, and there are countless ways in which that data can be transformed to yield insights into cancer, ancestry, microbiome dynamics, metagenomics, and many other areas of interest.

Because there are so many different platforms and so many different scripts and tools to analyze genome data, there is a great need to standardize the way in which these steps are communicated. The more analysis steps and the more complicated a pipeline, the greater the need for a standardized mechanism of communication. The BioCompute standard brings clarity to an analysis, making it clear and reproducible.

A BioCompute Object (BCO) is an instance of the BioCompute standard, and is a computational record of a bioinformatics pipeline. A BCO is not an analysis, but is a record of which analyses were executed and in exactly which ways. In this way, a BCO acts as an interface for existing standards. A BCO contains all of the necessary information to repeat an entire pipeline from FASTQ to result, and includes additional metadata to identify provenance and usage.