The GMQL toolkit is freely available for non-commercial use at http://www.bioinformatics.deib.polimi.it/GMQL/.

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), a family of technologies for reading DNA and RNA, is changing biological research, and will soon change medical practice, by quickly providing sequencing data and high-level features of numerous individual genomes in different biological and clinical conditions. The availability of millions of whole genome sequences may soon become the biggest and most important "big data" problem of mankind. In this exciting framework, we recently proposed a new paradigm to raise the level of abstraction in NGS data management, by introducing a GenoMetric Query Language (GMQL) and demonstrating its usefulness through several biological query examples. Leveraging on that effort, here we motivate and formalize GMQL operations, especially focusing on the most characteristic and domain-specific ones. Furthermore, we address their efficient implementation and illustrate the architecture of the new software system that we have developed for their execution on big genomic data in a cloud computing environment, providing the evaluation of its performance. The new system implementation is available for download at the GMQL website (http://www.bioinformatics.deib.polimi.it/GMQL/); GMQL can also be tested through a set of predefined queries on ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenomics data at http://www.bioinformatics.deib.polimi.it/GMQL/queries/.

BackgroundLife-science laboratories make increasing use of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) for studying bio-macromolecules and their interactions. Array-based methods for measuring gene expression or protein-DNA interactions are being replaced by RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq. Sequencing is generally performed by specialized facilities that have to keep track of sequencing requests, trace samples, ensure quality and make data available according to predefined privileges.An integrated tool helps to troubleshoot problems, to maintain a high quality standard, to reduce time and costs. Commercial and non-commercial tools called LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems) are available for this purpose. However, they often come at prohibitive cost and/or lack the flexibility and scalability needed to adjust seamlessly to the frequently changing protocols employed.In order to manage the flow of sequencing data produced at the Genomic Unit of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), we developed SMITH (Sequencing Machine Information Tracking and Handling).MethodsSMITH is a web application with a MySQL server at the backend. Wet-lab scientists of the Centre for Genomic Science and database experts from the Politecnico of Milan in the context of a Genomic Data Model Project developed SMITH. The data base schema stores all the information of an NGS experiment, including the descriptions of all protocols and algorithms used in the process. Notably, an attribute-value table allows associating an unconstrained textual description to each sample and all the data produced afterwards. This method permits the creation of metadata that can be used to search the database for specific files as well as for statistical analyses.ResultsSMITH runs automatically and limits direct human interaction mainly to administrative tasks. SMITH data-delivery procedures were standardized making it easier for biologists and analysts to navigate the data. Automation also helps saving time. The workflows are available through an API provided by the workflow management system. The parameters and input data are passed to the workflow engine that performs de-multiplexing, quality control, alignments, etc.ConclusionsSMITH standardizes, automates, and speeds up sequencing workflows. Annotation of data with key-value pairs facilitates meta-analysis.