BGDMdocker: a Docker workflow for data mining and visualization of bacterial pan-genomes and biosynthetic gene clusters

Recently, Docker technology has received increasing attention throughout the bioinformatics community. However, its implementation has not yet been mastered by most biologists, and thus its application in biological research has been limited. In order to popularize this technology in the field of bioinformatics and promote the use of publicly available bioinformatics tools, such as Dockerfiles and Images from communities, governmental, and private owners in Docker Hub Registry and other Docker-based resources, we introduce here a complete and accurate bioinformatics workflow based on Docker to analyze and visualize pan-genomes and biosynthetic gene clusters of bacteria. This provides a new solution for bioinformatics mining of big data from various public biological databases. This step-by-step guide creates an integrative workflow through a Dockerfile to allow researchers to build their own Image and run Container easily.