Generating solutions

With Genome Canada support, Dr. Lincoln Stein of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research successfully developed Dockstore, a system that enables complex computational biology algorithms to be run reliably and reproducibly across multiple platforms. It has been adopted as the leading packaging technology by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and is now used by numerous third-party bioinformatics groups. Marc Fiume of the Canadian company DNAstack is collaborating with Dr. Stein and his team to maximize the utility of Dockstore.

The aim of these enhancements is to promote greater collaboration and sharing among computational biology software developers. Specifically, the enhancements will make Dockstore easier to use, make its packages more powerful and expressive, increase its interoperability and enable these packages to run more easily on a wide range of systems and hardware architectures. The bioinformatics and computational biology community will benefit from this software, while the research results derived from it that are reproducible, portable and reusable.