AfterParty

The next generation of DNA sequence acquisition platforms is transforming the way research programs can collect data
on new species of interest. However the tools for effective analysis and exploitation of these data are only now being
produced. One lacuna in the toolkit for next generation genomics data analysis is the area of de novo transcriptome
assembly and annotation. While mature tools for Sanger dideoxy transcriptomics (such as PartiGene) have wide take-up,
there is no such tool for transcriptome data emerging from, especially, the Roche 454 Titanium platform.
We propose the complete reengineering of the well-tried PartiGene suite of transcriptome tools to deliver
AfterParty, wherein we will embed best practice in data filtering, assembly, annotation and interpretation tools.
We will write the tool using Grails, a modern web framework that provides a robust platform for building rich web
applications. Using Grails will let us take advantage of existing libraries for common web application tasks, allowing us to
focus our development effort on the specific transcriptome analysis and visualization tools. The AfterParty user
interface will have two modes: assembling/annotating (for use by the individual building the dataset) and browsing/datamining
(for use by workers querying the data with specific research questions). Using the Grails server-client architecture
we can facilitate different levels of access to the data.