ViralWasm: a client-side user-friendly web application suite for viral genomics

Bioinformatics. 2024 Jan 2;40(1):btae018. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae018.

Abstract

Motivation: The genomic surveillance of viral pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 has been critical to modern epidemiology and public health, but the use of sequence analysis pipelines requires computational expertise, and web-based platforms require sending potentially sensitive raw sequence data to remote servers.

Results: We introduce ViralWasm, a user-friendly graphical web application suite for viral genomics. All ViralWasm tools utilize WebAssembly to execute the original command line tools client-side directly in the web browser without any user setup, with a cost of just 2-3x slowdown with respect to their command line counterparts.

Availability and implementation: The ViralWasm tool suite can be accessed at: https://niema-lab.github.io/ViralWasm.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Genome, Viral
  • Genomics* / methods
  • Humans
  • Software*
  • Web Browser