Release note 04.26.21

RAS-CAVATICA Integration Phase 1 Completed

The Researcher Auth Service (RAS), sponsored by The Office of Data Science Strategy, is a service provided by NIH’s Center for Information Technology (CIT) to facilitate access to NIH’s open and controlled data assets and repositories in a consistent and user-friendly manner.

The RAS initiative is advancing data infrastructure and ecosystem goals defined in the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. RAS has adopted the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) standards for integration of researcher-focused applications and data repositories over the OIDC platform.

The goal for this effort is to coordinate all cloud stacks and use RAS identically across systems. The NCI CRDC (Cancer Research Data Commons) stack was chosen for the pilot phase to create a phased approach that should achieve the larger goals of federated data access using GA4GH Passports, with a focus on how this fits in with NIH data in general.

Phase 1 is now completed on CAVATICA, introducing a change to the login flow when using eRA Commons:

  • When choosing login with eRA Commons on CAVATICA, you will now be redirected to the NIH RAS login screen instead of iTrust.
  • Other than the login flow change, user experience on the platform remains the same.

Recently published apps

The following apps were published in CWL1.x:

  • SRA Toolkit 2.10.8 - NCBI’s collection of tools and libraries for accessing data in Sequence Read Archives format (SRA).
  • SRA Download and Set Metadata - a workflow that allows for downloading full SRA datasets and populating any metadata information that goes with the dataset
  • AnnotSV 3.0.7 - structural variant annotation and raking tool.
  • IsoformSwitchAnalyzeR 1.12.0 - a tool for differential splicing analysis, it performs statistical identification of the isoform switching while comparing two sample groups.
  • DRIMSeq 1.16.1 - performs differential transcript usage (DTU) analyses using Dirichlet-multinomial generalized linear models.
  • DEXSeq 1.36.0 - toolkit for testing differential exon usage in comparative RNA-Seq experiments.
  • Differential Exon Usage with DEXSeq 1.36.0 - a workflow constructed out of DEXSeq tools, meant for a comprehensive differential splicing analysis.

Changelog