The GEA Toolkit
The Genomics Education Alliance is working to provide a set of software and computational tools that are optimized for bioinformatics instruction and implementation of CUREs.
List of Tools
StarBLAST
StarBLAST enables educators to more easily incorporate NCBI BLAST into the curriculum by allowing students to run BLAST searches concurrently against standard and custom sequence databases. StarBLAST is an extension of SequenceServer (Priyam et al., 2019), which provides a graphical interface for running NCBI BLAST. It provides three deployment options that are optimized for different class sizes:
- StarBLAST-VICE: 1-25 students
- StarBLAST-Docker: 26-50 students
- StarBLAST-HPC: 50+ students
The easiest way to get started with StarBLAST is through the Visual Interactive and Computing Environment (VICE), which is part of the CyVerse Discovery Environment (DE). Students can perform BLAST searches with StarBLAST-VICE for free by leveraging the computational resources provided by CyVerse.
The StarBLAST program was developed by the students enrolled in the Applied Concepts of Cyberinfrastructure (ACIC) course in Fall 2019 under the guidance of Dr. Nirav Merchant and Dr. Eric Lyons at The University of Arizona.