ViralWasm: a client-side user-friendly web application suite for viral genomics

Published in Bioinformatics, 2024

Recommended citation: Ji D, Aboukhalil R, Moshiri N (2024). "ViralWasm: a client-side user-friendly web application suite for viral genomics." Bioinformatics. 40(1):btae018. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btae018

Motivation: The genomic surveillance of viral pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 has been critical to modern epidemiology and public health, but the use of sequence analysis pipelines requires computational expertise, and web-based platforms require sending potentially sensitive raw sequence data to remote servers.

Results: We introduce ViralWasm, a user-friendly graphical web application suite for viral genomics. All ViralWasm tools utilize WebAssembly to execute the original command line tools client-side directly in the web browser without any user setup, with a cost of just 2-3x slowdown with respect to their command line counterparts.

Availability: The ViralWasm tool suite can be accessed at: https://niema-lab.github.io/ViralWasm