GeneNetwork: framework for web-based genetics

GeneNetwork (GN) is a free and open source (FOSS) framework for web-based genetics that can be deployed anywhere. GN allows biologists to upload high-throughput experimental data, such as expression data from microarrays and RNA-seq, and also ‘classic’ phenotypes, such as disease phenotypes. These phenotypes can be mapped interactively against genotypes using embedded tools, such as R/QTL (Arends et al. 2010) mapping, interval mapping for model organisms and pylmm; an implementation of FaST-LMM (Lippert et al. 2011) which is more suitable for human populations and outbred crosses, such
as the mouse diversity outcross. Interactive D3 graphics are included from R/qtlcharts and presentation-ready figures can be generated. Recently we have added functionality for phenotype correlation (Wang et al. 2016) and network analysis (Langfelder and Horvath 2008).
GN is written in python and javascript and contains a rich set of tools and libraries that can be written in any computer language. A full list of included software can be found in the package named ‘genenetwork2’ and defined in guix-bioinformatics. To make it easy to install GN locally in a byte reproducible way, including all dependencies and a 2GB MySQL test database (the full database is 160GB and growing), GN is packaged with GNU Guix, as described here. GNU Guix deployment makes it feasible to deploy and rebrand GN anywhere.