A web engine for visualizing and sharing life science datasets
Qi Sun1+, Ali Nematbakhsh1+, Prashant K Kuntala2, Gretta Kellogg1, B. Franklin Pugh3, and William KM Lai3*
1Cornell Institute of Biotechnology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA
2Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
3Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, New York 14850, USA.
+Co-first authors
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Contact: wkl29@cornell.edu
The ability to aggregate experimental data analysis and results into a concise and interpretable format is a key step in evaluating the success of an experiment. This critical step determines baselines for reproducibility and is a key requirement for data dissemination. However, in practice it can be difficult to consolidate data analyses that encapsulates the broad range of datatypes available in the life sciences. We present STENCIL, a web templating engine designed to organize, visualize, and enable the sharing of interactive data visualizations. STENCIL leverages a flexible web framework for creating templates to render highly customizable visual front ends. This flexibility enables researchers to render small or large sets of experimental outcomes, producing high-quality downloadable and editable figures that retain their original relationship to the source data. REST API based back ends provide programmatic data access and supports easy data sharing. STENCIL is a lightweight tool that can stream data from Galaxy, a popular bioinformatic analysis web platform. STENCIL has been used to support the analysis and dissemination of two large scale genomic projects containing the complete data analysis for over 2,400 distinct datasets. Code and implementation details are available on GitHub: https://github.com/CEGRcode/stencil
Sun Q, Nematbakhsh A, Kuntala PK, Kellogg G, Pugh BF, et al. (2022)
STENCIL: A web templating engine for visualizing and sharing life science datasets.
PLOS Computational Biology 18(2): e1009859. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009859
STENCIL: A web templating engine for visualizing and sharing life science datasets
Qi Sun, Ali Nematbakhsh, Prashant K Kuntala, Gretta Kellogg, B. Franklin Pugh, William KM Lai
bioRxiv 2021.06.04.447108; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.04.447108
Documentation available here: http://pughlab.mbg.cornell.edu/stencil/