OMERO.biobank

OMERO.biobank is part of an ongoing, lab-wide, multi-year project at CRS4 to develop scalable infrastructure for data-intensive biology that natively supports reproducible, traceable data processing and analysis with integrated data uncertainty modeling. The aim is to provide a powerful system for handling large biomedical research datasets.

The infrastructure integrates a range of open source tools including Galaxy, Neo4j, Hadoop and iRODS. It has been used to build a completely automated Next Generation Sequencing computational pipeline, able to process the raw output produced by sequencers into analysis-ready files without human intervention.

This integrated system can increase the productivity of sequencing facilities with potential applications across a range of biomedical disciplines, including proteomics and pathology. Work is currently underway to extend OMERO.biobank so that it can be used as a bridge between –omic data produced by the analysis of tissue picked from pathology slides (or paraffin blocks) and the relative morphological information contained in the corresponding digital pathology slides.

OMERO.biobank is developed by the Zanetti Lab based in the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development (CRS4) in Sardinia.