HiTRACE-Web: an online tool for robust analysis of high-throughput capillary electrophoresis

TL;DR

HiTRACE-Web is an online, user-friendly platform that enhances high-throughput capillary electrophoresis data analysis with automation and speed, making complex RNA and DNA experiments more accessible and efficient.

Contribution

This paper introduces HiTRACE-Web, a web-based version of the existing HiTRACE software, with added automation and improved usability for high-throughput electrophoresis data analysis.

Findings

Faster analysis through parallelization.

Automated band annotation improves efficiency.

Accessible via a user-friendly online platform.

Abstract

To facilitate the analysis of large-scale high-throughput capillary electrophoresis data, we previously proposed a suite of efficient analysis software named HiTRACE (High Throughput Robust Analysis of Capillary Electrophoresis). HiTRACE has been used extensively for quantitating data from RNA and DNA structure mapping experiments, including mutate-and-map contact inference, chromatin footprinting, the EteRNA RNA design project and other high-throughput applications. However, HiTRACE is based on a suite of command-line MATLAB scripts that requires nontrivial efforts to learn, use, and extend. Here we present HiTRACE-Web, an online version of HiTRACE that includes standard features previously available in the command-line version as well as additional features such as automated band annotation and flexible adjustment of annotations, all via a user-friendly environment. By making use of parallelization, the on-line workflow is also faster than software implementations available to most users on their local computers. Free access: http://hitrace.org