AlmostSignificant: Simplifying quality control of high-throughput sequencing data

Abstract MotivationThe current generation of DNA sequencing technologies produce a large amount of data quickly. All of these data need to pass some form of quality control processing and checking before they can be used for any analysis. The large number of samples that are run through Illumina sequencing machines makes the process of quality control an onerous and time-consuming task that requires multiple pieces of information from several sources. ResultsAlmostSignificant is an open-source platform for aggregating multiple sources of quality metrics as well as meta-data associated with DNA sequencing runs from Illumina sequencing machines. AlmostSignificant is a graphical platform to streamline the quality control of DNA sequencing data, to collect and store these data for future reference and to collect extra meta-data associated with the sequencing runs to check for errors and monitor the volume of data produced by the associated machines. AlmostSignificant has been used to track the quality of over 80 sequencing runs covering over 2500 samples produced over the last three years. AvailabilityThe code and documentation for AlmostSignificant is freely available at https://github.com/bartongroup/AlmostSignificant. Contactc.cole@dundee.ac.uk, g.j.barton@dundee.ac.uk