Germany
December 17, 2019
 

From November 21 to 26, the Genome Graph Browser Hackathon took place in Tübingen, hosted by Computomics.

It was a pleasure to meet and collaborate with so many great minds at the Tübingen Genome Graph Hackathon. 
 

From left to right: Josiah Seaman,Torsten Pook (back), Simon Heumos (front), Toshiyuki Yokoyama, Christian Kubica, Ted Gibbons, Jörg Hagmann 
 

In a very enjoyable and productive atmosphere, we discussed and developed concepts for an intuitive visualization of variant graphs. We made great progress in implementing a first pipeline from a gfa-formatted graph to a draft user interface. 
 

Every project member is responsible for a certain piece of development.

• Erik Garrison (author of the vg toolkit and freebayes) drives an efficient graph data structure forward.
• Josiah Seaman (Kew Gardens London) drives the design of the graph visualization.
• Toshiyuki Yokoyama (University Tokyo), Christian Kubica (Max Planck Institute, Tübingen), Ted Gibbons, and Jörg Hagmann (both Computomics, Tübingen) implemented the viz pipeline.
• Simon Heumos (QBiC Tübingen) together with Jerven Bolleman (UniProt, Geneva) set the stage for augmenting the graph with public repository annotations.
• Torsten Pook (University Göttingen) optimized his Haploblocker software for the use on variant graphs to identify genomic regions in linkage.

All the pieces came together, and we’re happy to follow up on these efforts towards launching the first graph genome browser!

For more information on the project please write an email to jh@computomics.com or simon.heumos@qbic.uni-tuebingen.de 

Website: https://www.computomics.com

Published: December 17, 2019