Facilitating bioinformatics reproducibility with QIIME 2 Provenance Replay.

Study reproducibility is essential to corroborate, build on, and learn from the results of scientific research but is notoriously challenging in bioinformatics, which often involves large data sets and complex analytic workflows involving many different tools. Additionally, many biologists are not t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Christopher R Keefe, Matthew R Dillon, Elizabeth Gehret, Chloe Herman, Mary Jewell, Colin V Wood, Evan Bolyen, J Gregory Caporaso
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2023-11-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011676&type=printable
Description
Summary:Study reproducibility is essential to corroborate, build on, and learn from the results of scientific research but is notoriously challenging in bioinformatics, which often involves large data sets and complex analytic workflows involving many different tools. Additionally, many biologists are not trained in how to effectively record their bioinformatics analysis steps to ensure reproducibility, so critical information is often missing. Software tools used in bioinformatics can automate provenance tracking of the results they generate, removing most barriers to bioinformatics reproducibility. Here we present an implementation of that idea, Provenance Replay, a tool for generating new executable code from results generated with the QIIME 2 bioinformatics platform, and discuss considerations for bioinformatics developers who wish to implement similar functionality in their software.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358