Web Service-Enabled Grid-Based Platform for Drug Resistance Management

HIV Drug Resistance testing has been established as a routine test in several cases. Estimation of genotypic resistance is a laborious task consisting of experimental procedure and complicated algorithmic interpretation of mutational pattern (sequence data). Since the sequencing procedure is not error free, it is often necessary to proceed into quality checking and manual editing of the raw data (chromatograms). This paper presents the design and development of a grid-based platform that assists the storage and analysis of HIV nucleotide sequences both for clinical practice and research purposes. Modular software components were implemented for sequence uploading, quality verification, mutation identification, genotypic resistance interpretation, phylogenetic analysis, multiple-sequence alignment and sophisticated mutation querying. Moreover these services have been exported as web services in order to provide a high layer of abstraction and enhanced collaboration among researchers. The platform has been validated and tested with more than 500 HIV sequences.