Chris Wright, Senior Director of Customer Bioinformatics at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, presented at London Calling 2023 on “Leveraging Nextflow for the analysis of anything, anywhere, by anyone.” I have used Nextflow and EPI2ME Labs for maybe two years and enjoyed the easy-to-use workflows that are available. Wright focuses on delivering bioinformatics by packaging algorithms to non-traditional bioinformaticians. Their goal is essentially to make bioinformatics more accessible. Wright formed the EPI2ME Labs group with a focus on making bioinformatics tools more accessible. In this presentation, they shared a video of the user interface “on top of” Nextflow. The platform is compatible with Windows, MacOS, Linux and is fully supported. EPI2ME Labs workflows are freely available on GitHub. Wright explained that everything is written in Nextflow, and demonstration datasets come with each workflow. Docker and GitHub are used to deploy and manage workflows. The user interface is through Electron. Wright noted that Nextflow has a reputation for a steep learning curve. Wright also explained that real-time workflows are possible and provided an example with a metagenomics workflow. They are also building or rebuilding so that people can use EPI2ME Labs on new Apple devices. EPI2ME Labs also allows for importing workflows. The example provided was NF Core that I will look into. EPI2ME ONE will be run on the cloud. The Early Access Release will be free. I signed up and want to try EPI2ME ONE as well as importing workflows.
