6 posts tagged with "reproducibility"

In Part 1, we built a complete 16-step GATK variant calling pipeline in bash—perfect for academic research and 1-10 samples. But what happens when you need to scale to 100+ samples? This is where Nextflow becomes essential.

📁 Repository: All code from this tutorial is organized in the variant-calling-gatk-pipeline-best-practice-from-scratch repository. The structure follows best practices with separate directories for bash (workflows/bash/) and Nextflow (workflows/nextflow/) implementations.

Running interactive web applications like RStudio, JupyterLab, and Code Server in containers is a powerful way to provide reproducible analysis environments. However, users often need to spawn additional containerized tools from within these applications. Docker out of Docker (DooD) elegantly solves this by allowing containers to access the host's Docker daemon. This post explains how to set up DooD for interactive web applications and why it's the right approach for bioinformatics workflows.

Whether your lab uses bash scripts, Python workflows, Snakemake pipelines, or custom solutions—your in-house pipeline works fine locally. It's been running for years. But as your research scales, you face a hard truth: in-house pipelines don't scale, aren't reproducible across teams, and require constant manual fixes.

Building reproducible bioinformatics pipelines is hard. Every project starts from scratch with its own testing, CI/CD, and deployment strategy. What if you could clone a template, add your analysis tools, and be ready to go?

This post introduces a standardized bioinformatics workflow template featuring consistent testing, CI/CD, and project structure. Developed from real production experience with bioinfor-wf-template, this template reduces setup time from days to minutes, ensures research reproducibility, and promotes modular, reusable code. It is Python-based and ideal for proof-of-concept projects. Support for more advanced and widely adopted bioinformatics frameworks (such as Snakemake and Nextflow) is planned, applying the same core principles while leveraging their native testing systems.

Welcome to Part 2 of our series on version control in bioinformatics. In Part 1, we introduced Git fundamentals, branching strategies, and collaborative workflows. In this post, we'll dive into how Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) can transform your bioinformatics projects. If these concepts are new to you, don't worry—this guide will walk you through managing your bioinformatics repository to ensure your work is easily reproducible on any machine. Whether your server is wiped or you need to spin up a new virtual machine, you'll be able to quickly rerun your pipeline. With CI/CD, every code update can automatically trigger tests on a small dataset to verify everything works before scaling up, ensuring that new changes don't break your results or workflows.

In Part 1 (this post), we explore the history of Git, its integration with GitHub, and basic hands-on tutorials. Part 2 (coming soon) will cover real-world bioinformatics examples and advanced workflows with best practices.

This part focuses on practical applications, including NGS quality control using multiqc and fastqc.