New JBrowse 2 release

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We decided to release an updated JBrowse 2 after feedback from users at the International Worm Meeting. There are several new items in this release:

  • There is now a Help menu item specifically for WormBase users.
  • The CRISPR related tracks have been ported over from JBrowse 1.
  • The CeNDR track has been returned to functioning.
  • The details panel for genes now has a link to that gene at the Alliance of Genome Resources

Of course, if you experience any issues with JBrowse 2 or any other part of WormBase, please let us know.

JBrowse 2: Sharing views

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Sharing views in JBrowse 2 is not as easy as it is in JBrowse 1, but there is also more power in the ability to share views and data. In JBrowse 1, the entire state of the “core” view is always encoded in the URL: if you copy the URL from the browser’s location bar and send it to someone, they will get the same view as the original user. This has several limits though: if the user has loaded local data, no information about it would get into the URL. The same is true if the user has created a sequence search track: that information is not encoded in the URL.

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JBrowse 2: Adding your own data

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JBrowse 2 provides considerable support for adding your own data. The first point about adding your own data is this: it doesn’t get uploaded to anywhere. The data you add always stays where it starts, there is no “uploading” of the data. This is an important point if you are worried about the privacy of your data.

JBrowse supports several common formats for genomics data, including GFF, VCF, BED, BigWig, BigBed, and BAM/CRAM. For a complete list of supported formats, see the JBrowse 2 documentation. For supported formats, the only caveat is that the reference sequence names should be names that the WormBase JBrowse will recognize. In this case, that means chromosome names like I, II, etc for C. elegans should be used, though JBrowse also understands aliases like chrI and chrII, which is what the UCSC Genome Browser uses.

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JBrowse 2: Comparative data

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JBrowse 2 has the ability to display pairwise comparative data. At WormBase, we have comparative data between these species/assemblies:

  • C. elegans N2
  • C. elegans Hawaiian strain
  • C. elegans VC2010
  • C. brenneri
  • C. briggsae
  • C. inopinata
  • C. japonica
  • C. remanei 

These comparisons are made with minimap2 with the option to generate CIGAR strings. The CIGAR strings allow JBrowse to show the inserts and deletions between the compared genomes.  These pre-computed comparisons can be found in a few ways from WormBase’s JBrowse.

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JBrowse 2: Working with lists, bookmarks and sessions

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Spreadsheet view

JBrowse 2 has a “spreadsheet view” that looks much like you might expect: a simple spreadsheet. The primary way a WormBase user might interact with the spreadsheet view is if you have a file that has a list of genomic locations that are of interest and you’d like to step through.  For example, consider this list of locations that have comments separated by a tab (so that this is a tsv file–JBrowse supports tsv, csv, VCF, BED and BEDPE files in the spreadsheet view:

  I:16,632..17,470     site 1
  I:314,852..315,768   site 2
  I:382,162..383,013   site 3--this is the good one
  I:397,470..398,755   site 4 

You can put this in the spreadsheet view by selecting “Spreadsheet view” from the Add menu:

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