The Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on May 24 unveiled the fourth version of its Genome Analysis Toolkit, which will be released under an open-source software license.
More than 45,000 academic and commercial users across the globe already run their genome analyses on GATK. The GATK4 upgrade aims to accelerate this research with cloud deployment and speed optimizations.
"Thanks to the rapid adoption of cloud computing, researchers can finally do away with many of the infrastructure-related complications that have hampered progress, especially at smaller institutions and startups," said Eric Banks, PhD, senior director of data sciences and data engineering at the Broad Institute.
The open-source tool is part of the Broad Institute's five-year $25 million collaboration with Intel, which launched in November. The collaboration established the Intel-Broad Center for Genomic Data Engineering, where software engineers and researchers are building infrastructure to improve genomic data processing.
The Broad Institute expects to release a beta version of GATK4 in June. The toolkit will be available through the Broad Institute's cloud-based analysis platform, FireCloud.