Download A Computational Platform for Assessing the Impact of Alternative

Conclusions
It is quite common in molecular biology to have tasks that are frequently done and are
composed by a set of steps (a pipeline). A nice extension of the proposed web interface is an
interface where a computer scientist could "assemble" easily such type of pipelines. He/she
would upload or indicate the software to be used (if already available), scripts to convert
between file formats if necessary, and the pipeline would be stored as a single software tool.
Some steps in the pipeline could even get information from web data bases to be used in the
pipeline analysis, relieving the user from collecting some of the useful information from several
web sites (for example reference genomes). As users, biologists would only need to provide the
input file(s) and get the results without the need to call several programs and with the need to
know the inner working of the process. This work is partially done, however it can be improved
further by making it easier to build job pipelines.
We would also be very interested in a near future to use Data Mining tools to help in the
analysis process. Tasks like the use of clustering as a tool for outliers' detection could be useful
for identifying and explaining junctions with an origin in aberrant alternative splicing.
Classification methods that discriminate between "normal" and aberrant alternative splicing
could also help in the explanation of the phenomena. However for a proper and complete use of
such approaches, we need more time to enrich the information available in the ENCODE
project's database that we used.
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