Pipeline

How it is used

Used constantly in bioinformatics. People build, run, validate and maintain pipelines, often with workflow tools such as Nextflow or Snakemake. Clinical labs must validate their pipelines and keep them under version control. In biotech business, 'pipeline' also means the drugs a company is developing.

Example sentences

1. Our RNA-seq pipeline runs alignment, counting and quality control in one go.

2. The company has three antibodies in its clinical pipeline.

Common collocations

• bioinformatics pipeline
• run a pipeline
• analysis pipeline
• validate a pipeline
• drug pipeline

Related terms

• bioinformaticsThe use of computers, statistics and software to store, analyze and interpret biological data, especially DNA, RNA and protein sequences.
• alignmentArranging DNA, RNA or protein sequences side by side to find where they match, or placing sequencing reads in the right position on a reference genome.
• variant callingThe bioinformatics step that compares aligned reads with a reference genome to find where a sample's DNA differs, producing a list of variants.
• FASTQThe standard text file format for raw sequencing data. Each read takes four lines: a name, the base sequence, a separator line and a quality score for every base.
• annotationAdding biological information to sequence data, for example marking where the genes are in a genome, or giving each variant its predicted effect and population frequency.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• pipeline · Software Engineering
• pipeline · Cloud Computing & DevOps
• pipeline · Oil, Gas & Mining

More terms: Bioinformatics

• BLAST
• accession number
• phylogenetic tree