Easybin: metagenomics binning services for non-specialists

Abstract

Metagenomics is considered as one of the emerging areas in the field of bioinformatics. Binning is a key step carried out to characterise the composition of metagenomics samples. Even though there are many automated metagenomics binning tools, it is challenging to execute tools individually because a significant amount of time should be spent on installing, configuring and maintaining individual tools. Hence, unified web platforms that consist of multiple binning tools along with other complementary tools have been developed that are straightforward to use. However, none of these existing platforms provide a customisable and transparent workflow management system. Hence, we introduce EasyBin, a workflow management system for non-specialists which can model, execute, and monitor a metagenomics binning process with parallel process execution. Evaluation results show that EasyBin reports a mean SUS Score of 77.9 and gains a speedup ofx1.46 in workflow execution with parallel processing. EasyBin is open-source software available at https://bitbucket.org/easybin/easybin.