About Chorus Project
Chorus is a new cloud application that provides scientists with the ability to securely store, analyze and share their MS data regardless of the original raw file format. The goal of Chorus is to create a complete catalogue of the world’s mass spectrometric data that can be openly accessed by, and freely accessible to, the global scientific community as well as the general public. Chorus will be invaluable to scientists in all fields that rely on mass spectrometry as a tool for answering the questions: “What is it and how much is there?”.
Chorus is enabled by Amazon Web Services, Inc. a global cloud based computing environment that includes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and the Amazon extremely low cost storage service (Amazon Glacier). Chorus provides custom built data analysis tools that convert proprietary data formats to a common MAP Reduce format for processing large data sets with a parallel and distributed algorithms on the cloud. The initial data analysis tools include chromatographic and mass spectral viewers, as well as a database search engine for protein sequence identification. While Chorus’s capabilities have been initially designed to meet the data-intense needs of the proteomics community, Chorus’s chromatographic and spectral analysis tools can be used by anyone conducting MS analyses.
A distinguishing feature of Chorus is that researchers can choose to keep their data sequestered and entirely private, or they can choose to make their data available to select collaborators or put it in the public domain for world-wide access, analysis and discussion. It is the open sharing capability that leads to the name Chorus — a community of shared data voices which together generate new knowledge, new tools, and new understanding.
Stratus Biosciences, a not-for-profit corporation, has been formed by Yates, MacCoss and Bondarenko to manage and administer a public instance of Chorus for its worldwide users. As a not-for-profit, Stratus Biosciences’ goal is to cover its costs and ensure the sustainability and growth of Chorus for the mass spectrometry community.
Stratus Biosciences will be launching Chorus at the 61st American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) and Allied Topics Conference, June 9 — 13, 2013 at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, MN. A Workshop has been scheduled for the evening of Wednesday June 12, 2013 where participants can access Chorus on their laptops and mobile devices. Agilent technologies will also host a terminal featuring Chorus in their ASMS hospitality suite.