Gigsaw: physical simulation of next-generation sequencing for education and outreach

Modern sequencing methodologies produce more data in one run than a human being can read in a lifetime. Understanding how such vast quantities of information can be marshalled, assembled and interpreted is a challenging task for students and experienced researchers; it is even more challenging to have to explain this to lay audiences. Abstract representations, such as graphs or algorithms, or practical exercises with ‘black-box’ software, are limited in cultivating understanding. Gigsaw provides a physical model of next-generation sequencing data that can be readily manipulated, and different algorithms/experiments investigated at the bench top level. It is flexible in application and inexpensive to produce for public-understanding-of-science exercises or undergraduate/postgraduate training.

Availability: a Web server implementation of the Gigsaw software is freely available at http://www.compbio.dundee.ac.uk/gigsaw/ and provides the Gigsaw output as PDF aligned for double-sided printing. Source code is available upon request under an open-source license.