Bioconductor

Bioconductor is a free, open source and open development software project for the analysis and comprehension of genomic data generated by wet lab experiments in molecular biology.

Bioconductor is based primarily on the statistical R programming language, but does contain contributions in other programming languages. It has two releases each year that follow the semiannual releases of R. At any one time there is a release version, which corresponds to the released version of R, and a development version, which corresponds to the development version of R. Most users will find the release version appropriate for their needs. In addition there are many genome annotation packages available that are mainly, but not solely, oriented towards different types of microarrays.

The project was started in the Fall of 2001 and is overseen by the Bioconductor core team, based primarily at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, with other members coming from international institutions.

Most Bioconductor components are distributed as R packages, which are add-on modules for R. Initially most of the Bioconductor software packages focused on the analysis of single channel Affymetrix and two or more channel cDNA/Oligo microarrays. As the project has matured, the functional scope of the software packages broadened to include the analysis of all types of genomic data, such as SAGE, sequence, or SNP data.

The broad goals of the projects are to:

Each release of Bioconductor is developed to work best with a chosen version of R. In addition to bugfixes and updates, a new release typically adds packages. The table below maps a Bioconductor release to a R version and shows the number of available Bioconductor software packages for that release.

Small RNA sequencing is a widely used technique to study microRNA(miRNAs), small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), piwi-interacting RNA (piRNAs) that play a crucial role in RNA-mediated gene silencing process or known as RNA silencing /Gene silencing process. RNA silencing process employs different types of substrates which give rise to different types of RNA population, namely microRNAs, siRNAs, etc. In the laboratory, small RNA sequencing typically start by extraction of RNA from cells or tissues, followed by Adapter ligation to the 5' and 3' ends of small RNAs, followed by Reverse transcription and PCR amplification to generate cDNA libraries. Finally, High-throughput sequencing ( most commonly Illumina platforms) is used to produce millions of short reads. These resulting data then undergo computational processing to align reads to reference genomes of particular species or miRNA databases.

Bioconductor(BioC) is a widely used open-source platform for analysing different types of small-RNA sequencing and genomic data. It primarily utilizes the R programming language and offers a wide range of packages for bioinformatics and computational biology. Bioconductor provides a wide range of packages for handling small-RNA seq data among them few are widely used by researchers. Popular Bioconductor packages like DESeq2, edgeR, limma + voom, GenomicAlignment, GenomicFeatures, Rsubread, ShortRead, featureCounts provide robust analysis of RNA-seq data.