Hub Facade: View Track Hubs in Integrated Genome Browser

Abstract

Summary: Genome browsers are essential for understanding genomic data in detail but use incompatible data repository formats and access protocols, limiting their use. We present a new web application Hub Facade that translates the Track Hub format used by the UCSC Genome Browser into the Quickload format used by the Integrated Genome Browser (IGB), and vice versa. We used the Facade's translation capability to write a single-page web application for IGB users to search and add UCSC-curated Hubs to IGB for exploration and visual analysis. We created a new IGB App (GenArk Genomes) that uses the Facade to automate importing genome assemblies from GenArk, a Hub-based repository with nearly 50,000 genomes hosted by the UCSC Genome Browser team. An example use case investigating alternative splicing of human gene MEOX1 shows how using both browsers to view the same data via the Hub Facade promotes understanding and discovery. Availability and Implementation: Hub Facade is free, open-source software deployed at translate.bioviz.org. Code is available from git repositories at [bitbucket.org|github.com]/lorainelab/hub-facade. The use case is available as Supplemental File 1.