Hardware and infrastructure articles from across Nature Portfolio

This tutorial provides guidelines for imputing human leukocyte antigen alleles, including standard quality control measures for input genotyping data and best practice recommendations for association testing and fine-mapping to identify causal alleles.

The outbreak.info genomic reports provides comprehensive and detailed information about SARS-CoV-2 lineages and mutations worldwide, which facilitates near real-time genomic surveillance.

An accessible approach to multispectral imaging analysis of museum butterfly specimens is presented using consumer technology.

It takes juggling expertise to be an academic and a parent.

Cybersecurity is an increasingly important concern for reliable healthcare delivery and is particularly salient for robotic surgery. Surgical robots are complex systems with numerous points of vulnerability, and there have been real-world demonstrations of successful cyberattacks on surgical robots. There are several ways to improve the risk profile of robotic surgery, including recognizing system complexity, investing in regular software updates, following cybersecurity best-practices, and increasing transparency for all stakeholders. As robotic surgery continues to technologically advance, ensuring overall system safety from a cybersecurity perspective is paramount.

The biomedical research community is investing heavily in biomedical cloud platforms. Cloud computing holds great promise for addressing challenges with big data and ensuring reproducibility in biology. However, despite their advantages, cloud platforms in and of themselves do not automatically support FAIRness. The global push to develop biomedical cloud platforms has led to new challenges, including platform lock-in, difficulty integrating across platforms, and duplicated effort for both users and developers. Here, we argue that these difficulties are systemic and emerge from incentives that encourage development effort on self-sufficient platforms and data repositories instead of interoperable microservices. We argue that many of these issues would be alleviated by prioritizing microservices and access to modular data in smaller chunks or summarized form. We propose that emphasizing modularity and interoperability would lead to a more powerful Unix-like ecosystem of web services for biomedical analysis and data retrieval. We challenge funders, developers, and researchers to support a vision to improve interoperability through microservices as the next generation of cloud-based bioinformatics.

The NeuroCAAS platform simplifies data analysis in the neuroscience space for users and enhances reproducibility.

A real-time interactive, fully automated, low-cost and scalable biology cloud experimentation platform could provide access to scientific experimentation for learners and researchers alike.