BEW: Bioinformatics workbench for analysis of biofilms experimental data

Abstract

Biofilms research has evolved considerably in the last decade and is now generating large volumes of heterogeneous data. MIABiE, the international initiative on Biofilms, is devising guidelines for data interchange, and some databases provide access to biofilms experiments. However, the field is lacking appropriate bioinformatics tools in support of increasing operational and analytical needs. This paper presents a flexible and extensible open-source workbench for the operation and analysis of biofilms experiments, as follows: (i) the creation of customised experiments, (ii) the collection of various analytical results, following community standardisation guidelines and (iii) on-demand reporting and statistical evaluation.