New publication in PLOS Computational Biology

Christoph Baldow (research group Glauche, IMB) and Sebastian Salentin (bioinformatics group Michael Schroeder at the BIOTEC, TUD) jointly published a research article in PLOS Computational Biology entitled "MAGPIE: Simplifying Access and Execution of Computational Models in the Life Sciences".

The presented webserver has been developed to address a key issue in connecting a modelling community with peers and collaborators from other backgrounds. In many areas of science, computational models are important tools to facilitate interdisciplinary research. However, the exchange of models and corresponding results between collaborators can be rather difficulty due to limited in informatical knowledge of application oriented participants. Although several solutions to simplify the research exchange have been established, many of them lack flexibility and simple interfaces. MAGPIE represents a new generation of collaborative systems, aiming at providing full flexibility for modellers, by not restricting them to certain predefined programming languages. At the same time MAGPIE provides a clear and intuitive interface for non-experts, such that the provided models can be executed directly on the server side and corresponding results are visually accessible. Additionally, one of MAGPIE's main features is the complete reproducibility by versioning all components. To this end, MAGPIE is also an interesting option in clinical environments, and as such, it is already used in the translational research project "HaematoOPT".