Providing Private Blast Access To Different Users

Question

[ugly.betty77]

Hello all,

I have a number of collaborators working on different RNA-seq/genome projects. Each group has its own genes assembled from RNA-seq, on which they like to run BLAST and other analysis. Also, some resources are shared between multiple groups. Finally, some of those resources will go public, when the papers get accepted.

I like to provide password-protected BLAST access for each group, and also provide shared BLAST access for shared data sets. So far, I have been able to handle these by creating multiple BLAST sites or password-protecting entire sites for shared collaboration. Now, with so much data coming in under all kinds of complex associations (between collaborators, not genes), I am somewhat lost.

Is there a software that allows setting up one BLAST site and creates password-protected access for different groups? I have to make sure only group A sees genomic set a, only group B sees genomic set b, group A and B see genomic set c, group B and C see genomic set d and NSA spooks can access everything.

Also, BLAST is only one kind of tool, but eventually I need to do the same for several other tasks biologists like to do on their data. Please feel free to suggest web-packages you know about for other password-protected group sharing.

Thanks !!

Answer 1

[SES]

There is a tool called SequenceServer that may be helpful for setting up a blast server. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking with the last question, but there is the BLAST Graphic Viewer and of course GBrowse (this may be overkill for simple tasks) from GMOD that are both able to display BLAST results graphically.

[ugly.betty77]

I clarified the last part.

Answer 2

[Manu Prestat]

You can set up your own version of Galaxy http://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Admin/Get%20Galaxy , in which users can share dataset as they want. And it"s not limited to BLAST.

[Björn]

I would also recommend that approach. The Galaxy NCBI+ Blast suite is a pleasure to work with. All what you need is to create the databases and storing them in so called data libraries. These can be accessed by groups, individuals ... as you like.

Answer 3

[Istvan Albert]

What you most likely need is a .htaccess password management tool like DirectoryPass

http://www.directorypass.com/

BTW: Titus Brown also has a small system called BlastKit that run as CGI scripts.

https://github.com/ctb/blastkit

[ugly.betty77]

Are you sure .htaccess will do? The wwwBLAST from NCBI pulls up files on its own. So, I have to install BLAST five times, and then copy the index files, right? Then I can create passwords in individual directories.

[Istvan Albert]

not knowing how this is set up I can't really advise on the best course of action.

Though I think that you shouldn't need to install blast five times. I think you could set up a wrapper script that sets the BLASTDB variable for each user would suffice.

.htaccess will work, but you will need to instruct the Apache server set up the setting. By default it should