The December 2007 issue of Science magazine labeled human genetic variation the "breakthrough of the year." The flood of data to illuminate disease is highly promising, but such rapid discoveries present significant analytical challenges for biologists trying to make sense of the complexity and volume of research data. Tasks such as juggling multiple analyses programs on the desktop, manually combining data from multiple sources, and/or managing computationally intensive programs locally can be daunting without the proper tools and infrastructure at your fingertips.

These challenges inspired the National Cancer Institute to support the development of geWorkbench, a desktop bioinformatics platform that enables users to pull together analysis and visualization tools to create a customized integrative genomics solution. This integrated platform provides the following benefits:

• Use of one, unified graphical interface
• Ability to combine data quickly from multiple datasets
• Use of analysis and visualization tools for gene expression, sequences, pathways, and other biomedical data
• Access to a vast array of computational analysis and visualization tools, such as t-test, hierarchical clustering, self organizing maps, regulatory networks reconstruction, cellular network visualization, BLAST searches, and pattern/motif discovery

Accessing analysis resources through geWorkbench and caGrid

At the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), an interdepartmental center at Columbia University, doctors Aris Floratos and Andrea Califano are leading the charge to establish geWorkbench as a portal to all caGrid-enabled services.