TCGA-Assembler 2: Software Pipeline for Retrieval and Processing of TCGA/CPTAC Data.

Motivation The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program has produced huge amounts of cancer genomics data providing unprecedented opportunities for research. In 2014, we developed TCGA-Assembler (Zhu et al., 2014), a software pipeline for retrieval and processing of public TCGA data. In 2016, TCGA data were transferred from the TCGA data portal to the Genomic Data Commons (GDC), which is supported by a different set of data storage and retrieval mechanisms. In addition, new proteomics data of TCGA samples have been generated by the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) program, which were not available for downloading through TCGA-Assembler. It is desirable to acquire and integrate data from both GDC and CPTAC. Results We develop TCGA-Assembler 2 (TA2) to automatically download and integrate data from GDC and CPTAC. We make substantial improvement on the functionality of TA2 to enhance user experience and software performance. TA2 together with its previous version have helped more than 2,000 researchers from 64 countries to access and utilize TCGA and CPTAC data in their research. Availability of TA2 will continue to allow existing and new users to conduct reproducible research based on TCGA and CPTAC data. Availability http://www.compgenome.org/TCGA-Assembler/ or https://github.com/compgenome365/TCGA-Assembler-2. Contact [email protected] or [email protected]. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.