The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland has released TopHat 1.3.0.
The new version of the spliced read mapper for RNA-seq data includes a restructured internal workflow that compresses all temporary data during a run in order to improve running time on networked filesystems.
The software now supports both GTF2 and GFF3 formats and can take gzip or bzip2 compressed FASTQ or FASTA files as input
Japan's Riken has released a new web service interface, called Semantic-JSON, to provide investigators with access to life science research data across multiple public and private domains.
The interface accesses a "virtual laboratory cloud center" named the Scientists' Networking System, which brings together 192 public database projects and provides access to data records and a network of semantic relationships.
The tool lets users access data from across the SciNetS network using the programming languages and information tools they normally use in their research by defining a set of simple but relevant commands for accessing and searching SciNetS data and their semantic relationships and delivering results in the JavaScript Object Notation format.
A paper describing the tools was published in a recent issue of Nucleic Acids Research.