2023/11/27 by Christopher R. Keefe, Matthew R. Dillon, Elizabeth Gehret +5 · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Computer Science · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Scientific Computing and Data Management #Research Data Management Practices #Cell Image Analysis Techniques
paper · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011676
openalex publication_date 2023/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Study reproducibility is essential to corroborate, build on, and learn from the results of scientific research but is notoriously challenging in bioinformatics, which often involves large data sets and complex analytic workflows involving many different tools. Additionally, many biologists are not trained in how to effectively record their bioinformatics analysis steps to ensure reproducibility, so critical information is often missing. Software tools used in bioinformatics can automate provenance tracking of the results they generate, removing most barriers to bioinformatics reproducibility. Here we present an implementation of that idea, Provenance Replay, a tool for generating new executable code from results generated with the QIIME 2 bioinformatics platform, and discuss considerations for bioinformatics developers who wish to implement similar functionality in their software.