Lyra -- containerized microservices for browsing shared biomedical data

TL;DR

Lyra is a containerized microservices platform designed to facilitate browsing, sharing, and interacting with large biomedical datasets through web interfaces, reducing technical barriers for biological research labs.

Contribution

The paper introduces Lyra, a microservices-based system that enables easy web-based access and interaction with complex biomedical data sets, streamlining data sharing and analysis.

Findings

Enables browsing of large biomedical datasets via web

Reduces technical barriers for data access

Facilitates data sharing among research labs

Abstract

Research papers in the biomedical field come with large and complex data sets that are shared with the scientific community as unstructured data files via public data repositories. Examples are sequencing, microarray, and mass spectroscopy data. The papers discuss and visualize only a small part of the data, the part that is in its research focus. For labs with similar but not identical research interests different parts of the data might be important. They can thus download the full data, preprocess it, integrate it with data from other publications and browse those parts that they are most interested in. This requires substantial work as well as programming and analysis expertise that only few biological labs have on board. In contrast, providing access to published data over web browsers makes all data visible, allows for easy interaction with it, and lowers the barrier to working with data from others.