Rbbt by mikisvaz

In a hurry?

wget "https://b2drop.bsc.es/index.php/s/ay9mqyD8CTE3GgA/download" -O ~/rbbt.singularity.img
alias rbbt='singularity exec -e ~/rbbt.singularity.img rbbt'
rbbt

What is Rbbt?

Rbbt stands for “Ruby Bioinformatics Toolkit”.

It was intended originally as my personal bag-of-tricks and evolved over the years into one of the most comprehensive development frameworks, at least to my knowledge.

It features tools that form the basis of most bioinformatics work:

parsing and tidying data
gathering and setting up resources like software tools and databases
organizing the sequential production of results for reusable/reproducible work
producing reports to share with collaborators
packaging interoperable functionalities into pluggable modules

The framework provides incentives to adhere to several reasonable standards that improve reusability and interoperability.

What are the main features in Rbbt?

Many of the features of Rbbt are organized around four large subsystems:

Workflows: A fully functional workflow enactment system like nextflow or cromwell, but with more advanced features. Rbbt has many workflows implementing functionalities from different areas of bioinformatics.
TSV files: Tab separated value files are the most versatile file format in bioinformatics, and Rbbt has plenty of functionalities to manipulate, index, traverse, persist, slice, reorder, sort, paginate and add semantics to them.
Resource management: Rbbt provides very succinct instructions to automatically gather, setup and configure data and software resources
HTML and REST: All Rbbt workflows are provided HTML interfaces as well as remote execution capabilities through REST. Rbbt has its own concept for the design of web applications that greatly cuts down development time.

Where has Rbbt been used and where is it used now?

Rbbt has been used in dozens of applications and projects in the last decade or so, including drug response analysis, text-mining, functional enrichment analyses, etc. Some of these developments have been discontinued and are not maintained, but they have all contributed to define the code base in Rbbt; many should still work, or can be made to work again, or can be picked for parts.

Currently the focus is on delivering workflows for genomics analyses that range from alignment and variant calling to functional interpretation in investigating clonal evolution, defining combinatorial drug therapies, designing cancer vaccines, etc.

What is in it?

A large number of workflows have been developed:

HTS: High throughput sequencing functionalities (DNA and RNA-Seq), like alignment and variant calling
Translation: functionalities to translate gene and protein identifiers across different formats
Sequence: functionalities regarding genomic analysis, such as mutation consequence analysis
Structure: functionalities for structural analysis of proteins
Enrichment: over-representation and rank-based methods for enrichment analysis, supporting: Kegg, GO, Nature Curated Cancer Pathways, Reactome, Biocarta, PFAM, Transfac, ect
and many more

How can I try it?

To try out workflows one easy way is to use them remotely. For example, to see available tasks for the Structure workflow; and the help for a particular task

rbbt workflow task https://rbbt.bsc.es/Sequence -h
rbbt workflow task https://rbbt.bsc.es/Sequence -h mutated_isoforms_fast

Translate gene names to Ensembl Gene ID

rbbt workflow task https://rbbt.bsc.es/Translation tsv_translate -g TP53,MDM2,RB1

Annotated coding variants from VCF file

rbbt workflow task https://rbbt.bsc.es/Sequence mutated_isoforms_fast -m <vcf.file> --vcf

You can also use wget or cURL, but remember to specify the _format as raw or json. Both POST and GET are accepted.

wget "https://rbbt.bsc.es/Sequence/mutated_isoforms?mutations=7:31003700:T&organism=Hsa/feb2014&_format=raw" --quiet -O -

If you want to specify any inputs as files, you can use cURL:

curl -H "Expect:" -L http://rbbt.bsc.es/Sequence/mutated_isoforms_fast -F "_format=raw" -F "mutations=@<file>" -F "organism=Hsa/feb2014"

Note the -H “Expect”, which is required for some reason

How can I benefit?

As a user by using the applications that it powers :) As a developer, by taking its code apart, copying the ideas, stealing shamelessly the implementations, or even by using the framework as it is supposed to be used.

The extent of the functionalities and the conceptual depth of the underlaying design makes approaching the Rbbt framework daunting. I’ve spent many work sprints improving the accessibility of the functionalities, but few on documenting the core. I believe a good programmer with a little guidance can easily find code examples in workflows and test sets that illustrate the myriad of ways the framework can be used. I have little time left to document more, but I’ll be willing to lend a hand to a motivated programmer if he find this interesting.

Rbbt

Ruby bioinformatics toolkit