BlobToolKit web viewer

When you first reach the BlobToolKit (BTK) website, you see a few menu items on top: About, Install, Viewer, Blobtools2, Pipeline, Specification, and bioRxiv. We will come back to these menu items later (in week 3) as they are mainly relevant for when you want to run BTK on your own assemblies. But for now we just want to use the public viewer which has BTK views for over 6000 eukaryotic species that have genome assemblies deposited in the public archives.

As you proceed through the course, we suggest you open links to the BTK viewer in a separate tab or window. Doing this will let you compare the explanations in the course steps with the actual live website. This will be particularly important when you want to use the interactive features of the viewer and change the settings and display. In this and the following steps, we invite you to follow along with the instructions and carry out the suggested actions using the BTK viewer.

To open the public viewer, click on the big “Open Viewer” button in the middle of the home page

This takes you to https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view/ – the public viewer app part of the website.

The first thing you see on this page is the “Datasets” section, which provides a tree-based browser for all of the species available, and a search box for species

In the next step we will see how to use the browser or search box to select an organism of interest.