Accessible and interactive RNA sequencing analysis using serverless computing

We present a novel method that yields 1100-fold computational speedup and allows biomedical scientists to interactively adjust alignment parameters in real time to iteratively improve final analytical results. Specifically, the alignment time for a 640 million read human RNA-sequencing dataset is reduced from 19 hours to 1 minute using serverless cloud computing. We provide a graphical interface for the accelerated workflows, thus making our methodology accessible to non-cloud experts.