What are DNAnexus Assets
An Asset Bundle is conceptually the same as an applet resource. It encapsulates software dependancies and resources for a workflow, application or applet. For example, if you were building a Tumor Mutational Burden applet you might create an asset containing the following resources:
- Tools, Data and Genome References:
- BAM-Matcher, Samtools, snpEff, and GATK Tools binaries etc.
- A human genome reference
- Annotation sets from dbSNP, COSMIC, ExAC, 1000 Genomes etc.
- Custom binaries and libraries for compute node natively build or furnished on AWS or AZURE:
- Any Makefile-base build of a set of tools native built for AWS or AZURE.
- An appropriate version of R, Bioconductor and other R dependancies.
- A complex set of required Python modules.
How to Build an Asset
DNAnexus provides an excellent tutorial on how to build an assets.
Pros and Cons
- Available for one or more workflow, application or applet.
- Reduced development time – done once verses every time the applet is rebuilt.
- Download of dependancies will not fail do to availability of software repositories.
- Cons, well none really.