Is there a demo of the UI on the site? If not, It would be nice if we can see some kind of demo of the UI. Maybe setup a demo where user can submit some internal mock data and press a few buttons to get pre-processed results.

As a side note, philosophically, I don't completely agree with what you wrote in the "about us" section. I think scientists should try to understand the ins and outs of all their data analysis. I understand that learning the practical steps of how to run something on the command line or changing data formats is probably not that important, but I do hope scientists should at least learn the theory/concept behind the analysis. There are people who perform differential expression analysis without really understanding what the results mean, ultimately leading to wrong conclusions. I hope these services don't perpetuate that.

Hi Damian,

Thanks for the feedback! If you to test the site yourself, I'd be happy to send over some test data to work with, it takes about 10-15 minutes to run through(total). Let me know and I'll post up a link to the file you can test with. Alternatively, feel free to run your own data through. We have indexes for Human, Mouse, Rat, and C. Elegans. We will be making a video sometime soon.

Re: The philosophical side of data analysis, I agree that people should know what is going on with their data. I've seen plenty of bad studies published because people had no idea what they were doing with their analysis. As we grow, we will build in more and more "best practices" into the system to avoid people just putting in garbage and getting garbage data out. For example, we check samples after they go through alignment to make sure they mapped well. If things look bad, we automatically provide a description of what could have happened to cause that problem and stop the analysis. In the future, we will add automatic trimming, best statistical practices and more.

We can't avoid bad research getting out there, but being that everything is controlled with best practices built in, we hope that we can avoid having people publishing bad data due to their poor understanding of the tools currently available.

Hi

Great, I am a new person in this field and I entirely agree with the philosophical side of data analysis. Before than every things I always think about the aim and choice best method to getting enough and good data. Oftentimes I think about coverage (do I have enough data for analysis or NOT). I don't know exactly but just as an offer, probably you can create a part to estimate coverage and calculate number of reads to having a background about existence enough data base on genome size and others parameters.