Figure 1

Schematic illustration of the VAS workflow. Genomic features are pre-sorted and stored in data files with pointers for direct access to particular genomic locations. A user supplies the list of genetic variants and selects the genomic features to integrate with the variants at the client side. The variants extractor produces a compressed form of the input variants. The task is then sent to the backend and put into a waiting queue, and the user is shown a waiting page. When an execution daemon becomes available, it fetches the next task in the queue and uses the customized algorithms to perform data integration. The integration results are stored in a tab-delimited file. The user will then be shown a summary page of the integration results. An email notification will also be sent, with a link for a user to retrieve the summary page later. The user can then view the integration details of each input variant, perform interactive analysis on the UCSC Genome Browser, or download the annotation results in tab-delimited or Excel format.