fDESI: An open-source web application for visual bioinformatics pipeline design

In bioinformatics, data analysis often involves complex workflows that require processing vast amounts of biological data. Pipelines play a crucial role in automating and organizing these sequences of computational tasks, ensuring reproducibility, efficiency, and scalability. In this paper, we presented F LENP DESI gner ( fDESI ), an open-source and user-friendly web application for visual bioinformatics pipeline design. It allows intuitive pipeline creation through a drag-and-drop interface, generating pipeline descriptions in a JSON-based meta-language. Furthermore, it provides an all-in-one environment to overcome the need for external tools, beyond the third-party software within the pipeline itself. Our contribution includes a flexible framework for pipeline modelling, built-in functionalities requiring no programming expertise, an integrated execution engine, and an open-source graphical interface for streamlined bioinformatics workflow design.