NGSeasy

A next generation sequencing pipeline in Docker containers.

Bioinformatic pipelines often use large numbers of components and deploying them incurs substantial configuration and maintenance burden that remains a significant barrier to reproducible research. We aimed to define a new paradigm and best practices for developing, distributing and running pipelines encapsulated in Docker containers (lightweight virtualization), with a focus on next generation sequencing (NGS) workflows. This approach provides several advantages, namely: efficiency, portability, versioning and reproducibility. Using the NGSeasy pipeline, a user can quickly deploy any pipeline version in any environment (e.g. operating systems, workstations, clusters, clouds). While this might also be achieved with a virtual machine (VM); VMs lack portability, have substantial overhead (disk, CPU, RAM), and require allocated resources to be provisioned statically – Docker, to a large extent, solves these issues.

We demonstrate best practices for packaging and execution of a multicomponent pipeline for NGS using a set of container building blocks which are versioned, modular and reusable. We present a basic “proof of concept” evaluation of a next generation sequencing pipeline in Docker containers, capable of producing meaningful results, that are comparable with public and “best practice” workflows, with little to no impact on standard computing performance.

Both versioned Dockerfiles and container images for each component are published on GitHub and Docker Hub, respectively. The pipeline and containers can be pulled from Docker Hub and executed on any environment capable of running the Docker platform with minimum hardware requirements for running an NGS pipeline.