The ProGenGrid virtual laboratory for bioinformatics

A virtual laboratory (VL) is an environment where the applications are available as reusable components and are exploited within (“in silico”) experiments. The purpose of a virtual laboratory is to support collaborative work of all the people who are involved in any stage of the experimental process. Problem Solving Environment (PSE) is an approach and a technology that is used for the definition and composition of complex applications, hiding programming and configuration details to the user that can concentrate instead only on the specific biological problem. PSE allows building virtual laboratories specialized for a specific domain, such as bioinformatics. At the University of Salento, we have developed ProGenGrid (Proteomics and Genomics Grid), a system which aims to provide a virtual laboratory where e-scientists can simulate biological experiments, composing existing analysis and visualization tools, monitoring their execution, storing the intermediate and final output and finally, if needed, saving the model of the experiment for updating or reproducing it at a later time. Different bioinformatics services and workflows have been deployed in the LIBI (International Laboratory of BioInformatics) project, aiming at setting up an advanced bioinformatics and computational biology laboratory, focusing on basic and applied research in modern biology and biotechnologies. In this paper we present recent developments in the ProGenGrid system, with a special focus on the possibility to configure a computational grid by using the workflow editor. This new feature of the system allows to the user to create his/her own personal grid on-the-fly, by adding, removing, or updating its computer configuration.