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

Abstract

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