Pladipus Enables Universal Distributed Computing in Proteomics Bioinformatics

The use of proteomics bioinformatics substantially contributes to an improved understanding of proteomes, but this novel and in-depth knowledge comes at the cost of increased computational complexity. Parallelization across multiple computers, a strategy termed distributed computing, can be used to handle this increased complexity; however, setting up and maintaining a distributed computing infrastructure requires resources and skills that are not readily available to most research groups. Here we propose a free and open-source framework named Pladipus that greatly facilitates the establishment of distributed computing networks for proteomics bioinformatics tools. Pladipus is straightforward to install and operate thanks to its user-friendly graphical interface, allowing complex bioinformatics tasks to be run easily on a network instead of a single computer. As a result, any researcher can benefit from the increased computational efficiency provided by distributed computing, hence empowering them to tackle more complex bioinformatics challenges. Notably, it enables any research group to perform large-scale reprocessing of publicly available proteomics data, thus supporting the scientific community in mining these data for novel discoveries.