CloudSTRUCTURE: infer population STRUCTURE on the cloud

TL;DR

CloudSTRUCTURE is a cloud-based, parallelized application that simplifies and accelerates population structure analysis using STRUCTURE, with automated summaries and compatibility with downstream genetic analysis tools.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, HPC-compatible tool that automates and speeds up STRUCTURE analyses on the cloud, integrating results for further genetic studies.

Findings

Significantly reduces analysis time through parallelization

Provides automated summaries for optimal K determination

Ensures compatibility with downstream genetic analysis tools

Abstract

We present CloudSTRUCTURE, an application for running parallel analyses with the population genetics program STRUCTURE. The HPC ready application, powered by iPlant cyber-infrastructure, provides a fast (by parallelization) and convenient (through a user friendly GUI) way to calculate like-lihood values across multiple values of K (number of genetic groups) and numbers of iterations. The results are automati-cally summarized for easier determination of the K value that best fit the data. In addition, CloudSTRUCTURE will reformat STRUCTURE output for use in downstream programs, such as TASSEL for association analysis with population structure ef-fects stratified.