The Genomic HyperBrowser: an analysis web server for genome-scale data

Abstract

The immense increase in availability of genomic scale datasets, such as those provided by the ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenomics projects, presents unprecedented opportunities for individual researchers to pose novel falsifiable biological questions. With this opportunity, however, researchers are faced with the challenge of how to best analyze and interpret their genome-scale datasets. A powerful way of representing genome-scale data is as feature-specific coordinates relative to reference genome assemblies, i.e. as genomic tracks. The Genomic HyperBrowser (http://hyperbrowser.uio.no) is an open-ended web server for the analysis of genomic track data. Through the provision of several highly customizable components for processing and statistical analysis of genomic tracks, the HyperBrowser opens for a range of genomic investigations, related to, e.g., gene regulation, disease association or epigenetic modifications of the genome.