The immense increase in the generation of genomic scale data poses an unmet analytical challenge, due to a lack of established methodology with the required flexibility and power. We propose a first principled approach to statistical analysis of sequence-level genomic information. We provide a growing collection of generic biological investigations that query pairwise relations between tracks, represented as mathematical objects, along the genome. The Genomic HyperBrowser implements the approach and is available at http://hyperbrowser.uio.no.

Motivation Many high-throughput methods produce sets of genomic regions as one of their main outputs. Scientists often use genomic colocalization analysis to interpret such region sets, for example to identify interesting enrichments and to understand the interplay between the underlying biological processes. Although widely used, there is little standardization in how these analyses are performed. Different practices can substantially affect the conclusions of colocalization analyses. Results Here, we describe the different approaches and provide recommendations for performing genomic colocalization analysis, while also discussing common methodological challenges that may influence the conclusions. As illustrated by concrete example cases, careful attention to analysis details is needed in order to meet these challenges and to obtain a robust and biologically meaningful interpretation of genomic region set data. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Adaptive immune receptor repertoires (AIRR) are key targets for biomedical research as they record past and ongoing adaptive immune responses. The capacity of machine learning (ML) to identify complex discriminative sequence patterns renders it an ideal approach for AIRR-based diagnostic and therapeutic discovery. To date, widespread adoption of AIRR ML has been inhibited by a lack of reproducibility, transparency, and interoperability. immuneML ( immuneml.uio.no ) addresses these concerns by implementing each step of the AIRR ML process in an extensible, open-source software ecosystem that is based on fully specified and shareable workflows. To facilitate widespread user adoption, immuneML is available as a command-line tool and through an intuitive Galaxy web interface, and extensive documentation of workflows is provided. We demonstrate the broad applicability of immuneML by (i) reproducing a large-scale study on immune state prediction, (ii) developing, integrating, and applying a novel method for antigen specificity prediction, and (iii) showcasing streamlined interpretability-focused benchmarking of AIRR ML. 1.

The immense increase in availability of genomic scale datasets, such as those provided by the ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenomics projects, presents unprecedented opportunities for individual researchers to pose novel falsifiable biological questions. With this opportunity, however, researchers are faced with the challenge of how to best analyze and interpret their genome-scale datasets. A powerful way of representing genome-scale data is as feature-specific coordinates relative to reference genome assemblies, i.e. as genomic tracks. The Genomic HyperBrowser (http://hyperbrowser.uio.no) is an open-ended web server for the analysis of genomic track data. Through the provision of several highly customizable components for processing and statistical analysis of genomic tracks, the HyperBrowser opens for a range of genomic investigations, related to, e.g., gene regulation, disease association or epigenetic modifications of the genome.