Welcome to openSputnik - an open source infrastructure for large scale biological sequence analysis.

Why openSputnik? Sputnik is a pipeline and infrastructure aimed at both plant genomics and comparative genomics that was written and is maintained at the Institute for Bioinformatics at the GSF Research Centre near Munich. The platform was originally implemented to satisfy the needs of a consortium of German sugarbeet researchers (GABIBEET), and was later adapted to allow a more generic but high throughput analysis of plant-based biological data. Sputnik was implemented as a collection of loosely interacting Python scripts, a PostgreSQL database and a simple Apache webserver. The last release of Sputnik (version 4.0) can still be viewed at MIPS.

I have the feeling that Sputnik is of more value to the scientific community as a core computing infrastructure than as just a collection of pre-digested results. With the transition from Munich to Turku I decided to recreate the essence of Sputnik in a different langauge while solving some of the problems and rethinking the rationale underlying the computational platform. As a result I have started the openSputnik project and hope that this may make some form of impact in other research groups.

These pages try to introduce the ideas behind openSputnik, the uses and the philosophy. To download openSputnik or any of its components please have a look at SourceForge. If you would like to make a suggestion then please contact me.

Much of openSputnik is hosted at SourceForge

Stephen Rudd works at the Centre for Biotechnology in Turku, Finland