Life scientists are increasingly turning to high-throughput sequencing technologies in their research programs, owing to the enormous potential of these methods. In a parallel manner, the number of core facilities that provide bioinformatics support are also increasing. Notably, the generation of complex large datasets has necessitated the development of bioinformatics support core facilities that aid laboratory scientists with cost-effective and efficient data management, analysis, and interpretation. In this article, we address the challenges-related to communication, good laboratory practice, and data handling-that may be encountered in core support facilities when providing bioinformatics support, drawing on our own experiences working as support bioinformaticians on multidisciplinary research projects. Most importantly, the article proposes a list of guidelines that outline how these challenges can be preemptively avoided and effectively managed to increase the value of outputs to the end user, covering the entire research project lifecycle, including experimental design, data analysis, and management (i.e., sharing and storage). In addition, we highlight the importance of clear and transparent communication, comprehensive preparation, appropriate handling of samples and data using monitoring systems, and the employment of appropriate tools and standard operating procedures to provide effective bioinformatics support.

Motivation: High throughput bisulfite sequencing (BS-seq) is an important technology to generate single-base DNA methylomes in both plants and animals. In order to accelerate the data analysis of BS-seq data, toolkits for visualization are required. Results: ViewBS, an open-source toolkit, can extract and visualize the DNA methylome data easily and with flexibility. By using Tabix, ViewBS can visualize BS-seq for large datasets quickly. ViewBS can generate publication-quality figures, such as meta-plots, heat maps and violin-boxplots, which can help users to answer biological questions. We illustrate its application using BS-seq data from Arabidopsis thaliana. Availability: ViewBS is freely available at: https://github.com/xie186/ViewBS. Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.