Genome Workbench: a Desktop Application for Viewing and Analyzing Sequence Data

The visualization of genome data and annotation in a genome browser is useful but often insufficient. In many cases additional computation and analysis are needed. Alternatively, other views of a data set may be needed to get a fuller, more complete, picture. We have developed a desktop application called Genome Workbench (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/gbench).  Genome Workbench (gBench) is supported on multiple platforms and allows computation and visualization of publicly available data in GenBank as well as data that is local to the user. gBench supports both graphical and tabular data views and comes with several analysis tools already integrated such as BLAST, alignment clean-up tools, MUSCLE and a phylogenetic tree builder. We will demonstrate using gBench to load genome data, view alignments of NGS reads (BAM files) and building a phylogenetic tree.