Koala Genome assembled on AWS

Excerpted from AWS blog 
 
Five years ago, a research team led by Dr. Rebecca Johnson (Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute) set out to learn more about koala populations, genetics, and diseases. As a biologically unique animal with a limited appetite, maintaining a healthy and genetically diverse population are both key elements of any conservation plan. In addition to characterizing the genetic diversity of koala populations, the team wanted to strengthen Australia’s ability to lead large-scale genome sequencing projects.
Inside the Koala Genome
Last month the team published their results in Nature Genetics. Their paper (Adaptation and Conservation Insights from the Koala Genome) identifies the genomic basis for the koala’s unique biology. 

This work was performed on AWS. The research team used cfnCluster to create multiple clusters, each with 500 to 1000 vCPUs, and running Falcon from Pacific Biosciences. All in all, the team used 3 million EC2 core hours, most of which were EC2 Spot Instances.

Meet Nephele: Harness the Power of the Cloud for Your Microbiome Data Analysis

Nephele is a project from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that brings together microbiome data and analysis tools in a cloud computing environment. It aims to address a major challenge facing researchers today — namely, analyzing, transferring, and storing biomedical "big data" — through the use of cloud-based resources

 Why Use Nephele?

• Liberating: Nephele enables you to break free from constraints imposed on high-throughput computational analysis
• Simple: Nephele is designed to be a no-hassle, easy-to-use tool to support your research
• Sophisticated: Nephele is the most intuitive, advanced and secure microbiome analysis platform designed by our experienced computational biologists and software development team to provide exceptional capability with little effort on your part
• Fast: Nephele speeds up microbiome data analysis and paves the path to getting to your results
• Economical: Nephele's on-demand, pay-as-you-go setup offers a cost-effective alternative to using of dedicated resources for your microbiome data analysis

Ready to get started? Visit https://nephele.niaid.nih.gov/ and enter your email address. Check your inbox for a message with the subject "Your Nephele Promotional Codes."

Stay in touch! Email nephele@mail.nih.gov with your questions and feedback. You can also visit our Google+ community page to connect with other researchers in the microbiome community (https://plus.google.com/communities/107278901311674483366).

Source: https://www.biostars.org/p/204081/

Baylor releases Exome and WGS data of 7 cancer patients with Open Access

An open access pilot freely sharing cancer genomic data from participants in Texas

• Scientific Data 3, Article number: 160010 (2016) 
• ​doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.10
•  In a pilot Open Access (OA) project from the CPRIT-funded Texas Cancer Research Biobank, many Texas cancer patients were willing to openly share genomic data from tumor and normal matched pair specimens. For the first time, genetic data from 7 human cancer cases with matched normal are freely available without requirement for data use agreements nor any major restriction except that end users cannot attempt to re-identify the participants (http://txcrb.org/open.html).

There's whole exome seq data and 2 whole genome sequencing data where the sample quality is good enough for WGS.

A copy of the open-access TCRB data, conditions of use, and the HGSC’s Mercury informatics pipeline is available now for DNAnexus Platform users.

The full paper is here http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201610

A copy of the data is also available for DNAnexus Platform users here https://dnanexus.github.io/tcrb-data/