Abstract
Exponential growth of biological data, mainly due to revolutionary developments in NGS technologies in past couple of years, created a multitude of challenges in downstream data analysis using bioinformatics approaches. To handle such tsunami of data, bioinformatics analysis must be carried out in an automated and parallel fashion. A successful analysis often requires more than a few computational steps and bootstrapping these individual steps (scripts) into components and the components into pipelines certainly makes bioinformatics a reproducible and manageable segment of scientific research. CloVR (http://clovr.org) is one such flexible framework that facilitates the abstraction of bioinformatics workflows into executable pipelines. CloVR comes packaged with various built-in bioinformatics pipelines that can make use of multicore processing power when run on servers and/or cloud. CloVR is amenable to build custom pipelines based on individual laboratory requirements. CloVR is available as a single executable virtual image file that comes bundled with pre-installed and pre-configured bioinformatics tools and packages and thus circumvents the cumbersome installation difficulties. CloVR is highly portable and can be run on traditional desktop/laptop computers, central servers and cloud compute farms. In conclusion, CloVR provides built-in automated analysis pipelines for microbial genomics with a scope to develop and integrate custom-workflows that make use of parallel processing power when run on compute clusters, there by addressing the bioinformatics challenges with NGS data.