Unified omics data containers for robust, transparent and flexible computational biology

The analysis of data stemming from high throughput biology experiments offers multiple challenges to the computational biology and bioinformatics community, e.g. manipulation, annotation and visualisation of the data and transparent, traceable and reproducible analysis. These difficulties can be partly or completely lifted by appropriate data structures. A set of data representation for various omics data types, as implemented and successfully utilised in the frame of the Bioconductor project will be presented to illustrate how such unified interfaces to complex biological data and its associated meta-data enable scientists to focus on the processing, examination and interpretation of biological data.